A priming study on plural ambiguity interpretation in Turkish

Abstract

Priming can be defined as being affected by a specific linguistic form that is repeated. It is an experimental method that is widely used in psycholinguistic studies. Several experimental studies show that repeatedly employed syntactic structures affect linguistic production. In understanding the mental mechanisms of linguistic production, ambiguous structures have been major tools of analysis since they provide valuable information on how the mental processor works when resolving linguistic difficulties. Sentences containing more than one plural expression cause structural ambiguity. The present study aims at analyzing if priming has an effect on participants' interpretations of these types of sentences, which are ambiguous between collective and cumulative reading in Turkish. To investigate the priming effect in Turkish ambiguous sentences, three experiments were conducted. Sentence-picture matching tests were used to determine whether priming participants with one of the interpretations affects their interpretations or not. Participants were primed with collective interpretation in the first experiment, while they were primed with cumulative in the second. The third experiment was the control experiment, in which no priming was applied. To prime the participants, two images and an ambiguous sentence were demonstrated. Participants were requested to select a picture that best explains the sentence. In the prime trial, one of the pictures was related to one of the interpretations while the other one was irrelevant. Therefore, participants were supposed to choose the picture that was related to the interpretation of the sentence. In the target trials, one ambiguous sentence with two pictures was shown to the participants. This time, one of the pictures was related to collective interpretation while the other picture was related to cumulative interpretation. The data gathered out of the experiments were analyzed to observe if there was a relation between collective/cumulative prime and collective/cumulative responses and the direction of the relation. The results of three experiments showed that there was a symmetrical relation between collective prime and collective responses, while there was an asymmetrical relation between cumulative prime and cumulative responses. Overall, the outcomes show that in Turkish, speakers tend to interpret a collective reading out of the ambiguous sentences with more than one plural expression. © 2023 Peter Lang Group AG, Lausanne. Published by Peter Lang GmbH, Berlin, Deutschland. All rights reserved.