University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QB, United Kingdom.
Psychol Sci. 2011 Oct;22(10):1319-26. doi: 10.1177/0956797611416997. Epub 2011 Aug 26.
In the two experiments reported here, we uncovered evidence for shared structural representations between arithmetic and language. Specifically, we primed subjects using mathematical equations either with or without parenthetical groupings, such as 80 - (9 + 1) × 5 or 80 - 9 + 1 × 5, and then presented a target sentence fragment, such as "The tourist guide mentioned the bells of the church that . . .," which subjects had to complete. When the mathematical equations were solved correctly, their structure influenced the noun phrase--for example, either "the bells of the church" or "the church," respectively--that subjects chose to attach their sentence completion to. These experiments provide the first demonstration of cross-domain structural priming from mathematics to language. They highlight the importance of global structural representations at a very high level of abstraction and have potentially far-reaching implications regarding the domain generality of structural representations.
在本文所报道的两项实验中，我们发现了算术和语言之间存在共享结构表示的证据。具体来说，我们使用带有或不带有括号分组的数学方程式对受试者进行启动，例如 80 - (9 + 1) × 5 或 80 - 9 + 1 × 5，然后呈现目标句子片段，例如“导游提到了教堂的钟声，...”，受试者必须完成该片段。当数学方程式正确求解时，它们的结构会影响受试者选择将句子补全到的名词短语——例如，分别是“教堂的钟声”或“教堂”。这些实验首次证明了从数学到语言的跨领域结构启动。它们强调了在非常高的抽象层次上全局结构表示的重要性，并对结构表示的领域通用性具有潜在的深远影响。
