Dr. Martin Pickering教授简介

    Dr. Martin Pickering (The University of Edinburgh)爱丁堡大学哲学、心理以及语言科学院教授，爱丁堡皇家学会会员，担任著名的心理语言学期刊Journal of Memory and Language主编。在国际知名语言学及认知科学期刊发表论文200多篇（google scholar h-index=57）。

     讲座题目: 语言的表征与加工：来自结构启动的证据

     时    间:  2017年6月12日下午16:30-18:30

     地    点:  逸夫外文楼十层多功能学术报告厅B1001

     摘要：When people hold conversations, they tend to copy each other’s linguistic choices, and such imitation underlies communicative success.  It suggests that interlocutors share a range of linguistic representations, and also that each individual draws on largely equivalent representations in production and comprehension.  In this talk, I consider the nature of these representations and their relationship to language processing.  I primarily focus on representations concerned with syntax and discuss work looking at English, Mandarin, and Cantonese, in both monolinguals and bilinguals, using the experimental method known as structural priming (Pickering & Ferreira, 2008).  I briefly review early work demonstrating structural priming in dialogue, in which interlocutors tend to utter a sentence like The cowboy handing the banana to the burglar after their partner has used a syntactically similar utterance – a tendency which is considerably enhanced if the verb is repeated (the “lexical boost”).  I report similar findings in Mandarin within a speaker (i.e., production-to-production priming), and suggest that the same representations are used across languages and modalities.

      Priming is informative about the nature of linguistic representation, and provides a method that is in many ways superior to the use of acceptability judgements (Branigan & Pickering, in press). I illustrate this by considering several studies involving Mandarin, concerned with such issues as the syntactic representation of missing arguments, the question of whether semantics and syntax are fully autonomous, and the status of closed-class elements.  I also consider structural priming between languages and discuss its implication for language integration in bi- and multi-linguals. I report recent studies on the effects of language distance on priming, by comparing priming between Cantonese and Mandarin with priming between English and Mandarin.  Throughout my talk, I emphasise the importance of priming for understanding cognitive representations – both how they are involved in “psycholinguistic”questions of language processing and “linguistic” questions of the nature of language itself. In conclusion, priming provides a method for understanding fundamental issues in the language sciences, and at the same time underlies natural, everyday conversation.