Mathematical Thinking Lab, School of Education and the Sagol School of Neuroscience, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 6997801, Israel.
Mathematical Thinking Lab, School of Education and the Sagol School of Neuroscience, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 6997801, Israel.
Cognition. 2021 Oct;215:104821. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104821. Epub 2021 Jul 2.
When we say or understand verbal numbers, a major challenge to the cognitive system is the need to process the number's syntactic structure. Several studies showed that number syntax is handled by dedicated processes, however, it is still unclear how precisely these processes operate, whether the number's syntactic structure is represented explicitly, and if it is - what this representation looks like. Here, we used a novel experimental paradigm, syntactic priming of numbers, which can examine in detail the syntactic representation of multi-digit verbal numbers. In each trial, the participants - Arabic-Hebrew bilinguals and Hebrew monolinguals - heard a multi-digit number and responded orally with a random number. The syntactic structure of their responses was similar to that of the targets, showing that they represented the verbal number's syntax. This priming effect was genuinely syntactic, and could not be explained as lexical - repeating words from the target; as phonological - responding with words phonologically-similar to the target; or as a numerical distance effect - producing responses numerically close to the target. The syntactic priming effect was stronger for earlier words in the verbal number and weaker for later words, suggesting that the syntactic representation is capped by working-memory limits. We propose that syntactic priming could become a useful method to examine various aspects of the syntactic representation of numbers.
当我们说出或理解口头数字时，认知系统面临的主要挑战是需要处理数字的句法结构。有几项研究表明，数字句法是由专门的过程处理的，然而，这些过程是如何精确运作的，数字的句法结构是否被明确表示，以及如果是这样，这个表示是什么样子的，这些问题仍不清楚。在这里，我们使用了一种新颖的实验范式，即数字句法启动，它可以详细检查多位数口头数字的句法表示。在每次试验中，参与者——阿拉伯语-希伯来语双语者和希伯来语单语者——听到一个多位数，并口头用一个随机数做出回应。他们的反应的句法结构与目标相似，表明他们表示了口头数字的句法。这种启动效应是真正的句法效应，不能用词汇——重复目标中的单词来解释；也不能用语音——用与目标语音相似的单词来解释；也不能用数字距离效应——用与目标数字接近的数字来解释。在口头数字中，早期单词的句法启动效应更强，后期单词的效应更弱，这表明句法表示受到工作记忆限制的限制。我们提出，句法启动可以成为一种有用的方法来检查数字句法表示的各个方面。
