Social vs. attentional effects on syntactic priming

General idea -

Experiment 1

To evaluate social and learning-based accounts of syntactic priming, we are manipulating the emotion with which a stimulus is presented to participants. We will have two non-neutral realizations of stimuli, both of which should increase attention, but only one of which should increase participants willingness to align with a person. Ideally, we could contrast four conditions: neutrally vs cheerfully vs. aggressively vs. arrogantly spoken stimuli. The goal would be to distinguish between attention vs. two two types of hypothetical social effects: alignment to people we like or want to be like, or alignment to people with authority. Of course, many other social theories are possible (alignment to people we think need help).

To increase our chance to detect an effect and to guard against a complete null effect, the experiment will include a cumulative exposure manipulation: we will manipulate the amount of cumulative exposure to structure A and B (following Kaschak et al., 2006). I suggest four exposure conditions

• 100%-PO exposure: 0% DO, 100% PO
• 100%-DO exposure: 100% DO, 0%PO
• 50%-PO-first exposure: 50% DO, 50% PO, in two DO/PO-only blocks, starting with PO
• 50%-DO-first exposure: 50% DO, 50% PO, in two DO/PO-only blocks, starting with DO

Both the voice quality and the exposure manipulation will be realized between-participants.

Participants

Participants will be recruited over Mechanical Turk. We will need 12 participants per condition. For example, if we have 4 voice quality and 4 exposure conditions, the full-factorial design has 16 conditions and we will need 16 x 12 = 192 participants. The experiment will be pretty short (close to 15 minutes). So, we will pay $1.50 or less per participant.

Materials

As little as 10 and not more than 20 ditransitive prime sentences with a DO or PO structure (or, if you want to go for the active vs. passive alternation: active vs. passive) will be mixed with twice as many fillers. The sentences were recorded by Katrina Housel (female, 20 yo) in 3 different emotions: angry, happy, and excited.

Procedure

The experiment consists of three phases, the exposure phase, the test phase, and the social evaluation phase. During the exposure phase, participants participants hear auditorily presented priming and filler sentences. We may have to ask them some questions about the primes since otherwise they may not pay enough attention. We could also not ask questions in version 1 to see whether that increases potential effects of attention.

Lists are created as follows. First we create a master list with XX items and XXX fillers ordered so that at least one filler sentence occurs between prime sentences. Then we create the inverse list. These two lists will then be used for each of the conditions. For example, if we have 4 x 4 = 16 conditions, we will end up with 32 lists. Participants should be distributed uniformly across lists.

For each between-participant manipulation, two lists were created that only differed in the order of

During the test phase, participant describe pictures or complete sentence fragments ending at the verb (displayed in writing). If we go for the picture description task, participants will be instructed to "use just one sentence and try not to use any pronouns". If we go for the sentence fragment tasks, we need sentence like the following (from Kaschak et al., 2006:B74):

(1c). The soldier gave.

The test phase consists of 6 target production trials with twice as many fillers interspersed between them.

Predictions

Bock et al. 2007 find listening-to-speaking priming of the same strength and persistence (over time) as speaking-to-speaking priming. Cleland and Pickering (2006) find that speaking-to-writing and reading-to-speaking priming has about the same effect size as speaking-to-speaking priming.

Hence, we have a good chance finding priming from listening to writing. Kaschak et al. (2006), Kaschak and Borringe (2007), etc. have found that priming is cumulative. The overall proportion of structure A over structure B in recent experience (beyond the most recent prime) predicts how likely participants are to produce the target sentence with structure A. So, we should find the same effect: the highest proportion of PO targets in the 100%-PO exposure condition, the smallest proportion in the 100%-DO exposure condition, with the other two conditions somewhere between them. Furthermore, if recency matters, we would expect that the 50%-PO-first exposure condition will elicit more PO targets than the 50%-DO-first exposure condition. All of these effects are expected most strongly on the first target trial, but may show up on the later production trials, too.

As for the voice quality manipulation, XXX

attention theory

social theories

Potential references:

Bock, J. K. (1986). Syntactic persistence in language production. Cognitive Psychology, 18, 355–387.

Bock K., Dell G.S., Chang F., Onishi K.H. (2007). Persistent structural priming from language comprehension to language production. Cognition, 104, 437–458.

Cleland, A. A., & Pickering, M. J. (2006). Do writing and speaking employ the same syntactic representations?. Journal of Memory and Language, 54, 185–198.

Pearson, J., Hu, J., Branigan, H., Pickering, M., Nass, C. (2006). Adaptive Language Behavior in HCI: How Expectations and Beliefs about a System Affect Users’ Word Choice. Proceedings of ACM CHI 2006 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Pickering, M. J., & Branigan, H. P. (1998). The representation of verbs: evidence from syntactic priming in language production. Journal of Memory and Language, 39, 633–651.

Pickering, M. J., & Garrod, S. (2004). Toward a mechanistic psychology of dialogue. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 27, 169–226.