A Developmental Study On Speech Production Under The Influence Of Priming Materials

Speech production is a kind of complicated cognitive process, through whichpeople can express themselves and communicate with each other. Lexical productionand syntactic encoding are the most two important issues of speech production.Recently there were a lot of differences about the explanation of the lexical accessprocess and whether syntactic priming existed in the speech production of Chinese,and few of studies focused on the adolescenceTwo experiments were conducted in this study.96 students participated in experiment 1, including the students in grade 5 of theprimary school, grade 2 of the junior middle school, grade 2 of the senior middleschool and the sophomore. The types of priming materials and sentences weremanipulated to investigate the differences between producing active sentences andpassive sentences in each kind of priming conditions, and the characteristic of gradesabout speech production.Experiment 2 involved 24 college students. The Eyelinkâ…¡eye tracker was usedto explore the on-line process of speech production. The types of priming materialsand tasks were manipulated. The latency and content of describing the events, thereaction time on selecting the patients, and the eye movements measures wereanalyzed.The results showed that:Firstly, the ability of cognitive process during speech production was improvingas individual grows.Secondly, the discrete stage theory of the lexical access process during speechproduction was supported by our findings.Thirdly, the types between priming materials and sentences approached morecoincident, the reaction time was shorter and the errors in speech were fewer, whichindicated that syntactic priming involved in the speech production of Chinese.And finally, the landing position and the distribution of gaze duration anticipatedthe order of mention in speech production.