Does social structure modulate linguistic priming?

Abstract

Does human language spread primarily as a virus, or as a form of complex behavioral contagion? Simple behavioral contagion is analogous to biological contagion of a virus, whereby a single contact is sufficient to induce the adoption of a given behavior. In contrast, complex behavioral contagion is the process in which multiple sources of exposure/contact are required to adopt a behavior (Centola, 2010). We manipulate simple and complex language contagion in a language priming experiment. In one of two conditions (egonet-1 vs. egonet-5), adult participants take turns with six other players (confederates) in a picture description game. Specifically, the use of two syntactic structures will be investigated: dative structures (prepositional and double object dative) and transitive structures (active and passive transitive). Participants will be implicitly primed with prepositional dative and passive transitive structure because their use is preferred less in English. There will be a baseline session where we assess participants’ dative and transitive production without priming. We will measure the degree to which participants are implicitly primed for the target syntactic structures compared to the baseline. Crucially, in the egonet-1 condition, subjects are primed by a single confederate, while in the egonet-5 condition, the very same priming sentences are distributed among five different confederates. The cumulative number of priming sentences is equal in both conditions. If structural priming spreads via complex contagion, the egonet-5 condition should promote a greater difference from baseline in primed grammatical structure compared to the egonet-1 condition