Structural priming occurs when speakers reproduce recently experienced sentence structures. Structural priming experiments with adults have demonstrated that the adult production system is sensitive to abstract representations of sentences. Moreover, the existence of cross-modal priming suggests that the representations are abstract enough to be shared between comprehension and production. This proposal seeks funding to investigate structural priming with first language learners aged 2;6-4, both within modality (from production to production) and across modalities (from comprehension to production). Results are expected to shed light on the organization of the child's developing language comprehension and language production systems and the relationship between them. Three hypotheses are tested: 1) the hypothesis that structural priming stimulates learning; 2) the hypothesis of continuity between child and adult language, specifically, that the processing systems of children and adults are organized in qualitatively similar ways; and 3) the hypothesis of shared representations, that a subset of the representations used in language production are shared with language comprehension.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development (NICHD)
Type
Postdoctoral Individual National Research Service Award (F32)
Project #
5F32HD046238-03
Application #
7107976
Study Section
Language and Communication Study Section (LCOM)
Program Officer
Mccardle, Peggy D
Project Start
2004-07-05
Project End
2007-07-04
Budget Start
2006-07-05
Budget End
2007-07-04
Support Year
3
Fiscal Year
2006
Total Cost
$50,428
Indirect Cost
Name
Hunter College
Department
Psychology
Type
Schools of Arts and Sciences
DUNS #
620127915
City
New York
State
NY
Country
United States
Zip Code
10065