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The malleability of linguistic representations poses a challenge to the priming-based experimental approach

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2017

Rachel Ryskin  and
Sarah Brown-Schmidt
Rachel Ryskin
Affiliation:
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139. ryskin@mit.edu
Sarah Brown-Schmidt
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology and Human Development, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37203. sarahbrownschmidt@gmail.com
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Abstract

Recent findings show that experience with a syntactic structure has long-term consequences for how that structure will be processed in the future, which suggests that linguistic representations are not static entities that can be probed reliably without alteration. Thus, leveraging the effect of previous exposure to a syntactic structure appears to be an inappropriate method for studying invariant properties of language.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 40 , 2017 , e309
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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