Since the late 1990's, Michael Hoey has been exploring the concept of colligation. Stemming from his exploration, the theory of lexical priming (LPT) was developed. This theory proposed a radical new theory of the lexicon, which amounts to completely new theory of language based on how words are used in real world. Hoey showed in his theory that the phenomenon of “collocation” offers a clue to the way language is really organized. The term “collocation” is normally treated as the fundamental concept of corpus linguistics. Among the few corpus linguists who have attempted to combine psychology and corpus data together, Hoey was the first one who asked why collocation—the starting point of corpus linguistic research came into being. Per Hoey, collocation is a key factor in naturalness. It does not refer to the regular co-occurrence of words in close proximity to each other, but are words regularly associated in the mind. This psychological association contributes a text's cohesion (Halliday and Hasan, 1976).

The pervasiveness of collocation requires explanation. It must be a psychological concept and the most appropriate psychological concept is “priming” (Hoey, 2005). The term of priming was first used by Quillian in his series of papers published between 1961 and 1969. In these papers, priming was used to describe the process of what Quillian and other researchers named “retrieval from the semantic memory.” It was Neely (1976) who combined “priming” and “lexical” together. Prominent research by Scarborough et al. (1977, p. 14) mirrored and reinforced Neely's experiment in many respects, in that it showed that a prior presentation of a “stimulus word” (priming word) could affect the recognition speed of the later presentation (target word). Both Neely and Scarborough et al. seemed to indicate that a single exposure to a related word (or non-word) would be stored in one's head and, once the related trigger was given, a word belonging to the same semantic field would be retrieved from memory. The focus of this psycholinguistic discussion was the relationship between the prime and the target, “rather than the word per se” (Hoey, 2005, p. 8). Hoey noted priming in his theory, calling it “a property of word and what is primed to occur is seen as shedding light upon the priming item rather than the other way round” (Hoey, 2005). Halliday and Hasan referred to the process of collecting priming through encounters as forming a mental lexicon, but did not provide the underlying reason for why this phenomenon exists. Hoey (2005, p. 9) complemented Halliday and Hasan and explained some characteristics of priming in his theory:

The definition of priming was quoted at length to demonstrate that Hoey's use of priming is distinct from that of some psycholinguists (e.g., Neely, 1976; Scarborough et al., 1977). Priming, in Hoey's theory, stresses the word itself (per se). There is no priming word to trigger a target word; priming exists at the moment an individual decides to use a word. While the attention in some of the psycholinguistic work is on the recognition effects of a particular prime on a particular target, LPT is more interested in the way the target may accumulate such primes.

Priming builds on insights gained from corpus linguistics, and applies the notion of psycholinguistics thereto. Psychology is invisible and works on a far subtler level than the reoccurrences of word patterns. However, by making an analogy between mental concordance and computer concordance, priming can be studied by examining corpus evidence to indicate “the kinds of data a language user might encounter in the course of being primed” (Hoey, 2005, p. 14). Corpus cannot unveil how the head neurons work in the process of individual primings but indicates which primings are shared by large numbers of speakers in a language community. Indeed, psycholinguistics has shown corpus-based studies can provide results almost identical (<95%) to results obtained from psycholinguistic experiments (Gries, 2005).

Priming is not conscious choices of language users. Yet it can be consciously strengthened, weakened, expanded or reassigned. As Pace-Sigge and Patternson (2017, p. xiv) summarized that “primings are prevalent but they are neither fixed or prescriptive: they reflect one's exposure and language use.” The idea of Hoey's lexical priming has been in existence for almost 20 years. It has provoked many researchers to expand and advance this theory in various dimensions (details to be proved in Section Literature review). The researchers are more likely to approach this psychological subliminal effect as a possible explanation for corpus-based studies. Priming is contextualized. The previous researchers seemed to restricted their studies within textual contexts. Since LPT has been always seeking to explain various linguistic phenomena from a psychological perspective, the context where primings depend on should be extended to psychological dimension. This paper is aimed at filling this theoretical gap by bringing the concept of culture in psychology into discussion. A cross-linguistic study was undertaken to uncover cross-culture variations in psychological processes. As a consequence of radical economic growth, culture has emerged as a critical concept. It has become a “de jour concept of the contemporary discourse around the world” (Kashima, 2015, p. 1). It is regaining its place in psychology. The primary objective of psychology is to “describe, explain, predict, and understand human mind and behavior” (Kashima, 2015, p. 2). Applying culture psychology to complement LPT from a cross-linguistic perspective can first extend the theory's ability of accounting for cross-linguistic similarities and differences; and, second, expand the concept of context, which defines one's priming.

It has been more than 20 years since the 2005 publication of Hoey's lexical priming theory (LPT), since when various applications and expansions have been made to advance this theory in many dimensions. Expansions and advances have been provided either by applying the theory to a new linguistic field (e.g., spoken English, see Pace-Sigge, 2013, 2017) or to account for a linguistic phenomenon (e.g., metaphor, see Patterson, 2016). A review of the literature applying LPT to languages other than English (e.g. Finnish, see Jantunen and Brunni, 2013; Jantunen, 2017; and Turks and Ottomans, see Baker et al., 2017) implies that examining a language genetically different from English could generate new insights.

Although LPT has been applied and expanded by exploring English and other languages, it has not been fully explored and tested with Chinese, with Hoey and Shao (2015) being among the few researchers to address this issue. Through a preliminary study of several notions defined in LPT—collocation, semantic association, and pragmatic association—Hoey and Shao convincingly showed the possibility that the characteristic features of Chinese could be demonstrated with corpus and accounted for with psycholinguistic theory, such as LPT. However, they were not able to extend their study to either colligation or the integration between colligation and other conceptual notions. This article aims to fill this gap by examining the given lexical items at three contextual levels—collocation, colligation, and semantic associations. The focus of this study is attempting to find evidence of this dependency relation in Chinese and then contrast the given nodes based on a combinatory profile, which have not been done in the literature of contrastive linguistics. Based on the results of the contrast, the present study also explored an aspect not yet tackled in neither psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics or contrastive studies, i.e., whether LPT could be adopted to account for the priming features between English and Chinese; and whether their characteristic features of priming can be accounted for by taking culture psychology into consideration. The specific research questions in focus are:

The essence of LPT says that a person's repeated exposure to contextualized instances of highly similar sequences results in his or her being primed to associate those sequences with the recurrent features of those contexts. Every word is primed due to the cumulative effects of an individual's encounters with that word. The accumulated encounters of a word in a certain context or co-text then formulate a speaker's knowledge of this word. Hoey applied the psychological concept “priming” to account for the recurrent co-occurrence of words. The psychological explanations of collocation and other linguistic features (e.g., grammars and semantics) account for the naturalness of language. Hoey said a psychological explanation of collocation and other features implies that “there is no rational basis for believing that everybody's primings are identical” (Hoey, 2017, p. x). Previous research on LPT seeks to apply and advance the theory by testing English or other Indo-European languages. As a genetically and typologically different language from English, Chinese provides plenty of testing grounds for validating the theory. However, little research was conducted in applying the theory in cross-linguistic studies. To fill this gap, the present study attempted to extend the theory from the dimension of cross-linguistic contrast, which was not found in the literature. It sought to apply LPT as an explanation for cross-linguistic similarities and differences. LPT answers why collocation came into being and approaches the acquisition, understanding, and production of language; however, it does not address why similar or different primings occur in two distinct languages. The causal explanation underlying cross-linguistic behaviors needs to be provided. To answer these questions, we used cultural psychology as a backbone and claimed that words were primed culturally. Data displayed in the previous section will be discussed and accounted for.

We have examined the differences and similarities between world and 世界 shi4jie4 in terms of the three fundamental concepts defined in LPT. In general, their divergence lies in their congruence. Based on the data, we found that both world and 世界 shi4jie4 prefer to occur in the grammatical function of Object. In both English and Chinese, Object refers to the person or thing affected by the verb's action. It normally serves as a sentence's Rheme. The finding indicated that English and Chinese speakers commonly recognize world as an entity on which action can be taken. However, a different picture can be drawn if we glance at the verb collocates occurring before world and 世界 shi4jie4 when functioning as part of Object. While the verbs preceding world are develop, change, dominate, explore, etc., the verbs co-occurring before 世界 shi4jie4 are 走向zou3xiang4 (to walk to), 享誉 xiang3yu4 (to be well-known by), 闻名 wen2ming2 (to be renowned by), 成为 cheng2wei2 (to become), 居 ju1 (to rank), etc.

A large body of cross-cultural research has shown that Westerners generally meet daily challenges analytically, whereas traditional Chinese tend to take a holistic approach. The former approach refers to the “tendency to extract the underlying properties of an object or phenomenons from its context,” whereas the latter thinking style refers to the belief that “things are interconnected with each other, be this directly or indirectly” (Li et al., 2010, p. 156). The difference between the two ways of thinking resides in how they view human beings' connections with their contexts. The BNC language users may conceptualize the world based on the context and treat it as an entity that could be developed, changed, explored or even created. In contrast, the Chinese language users of zhTenTen 11 tend to adopt a zhong yong (the doctrine of the mean) relation with the world, ranking it at the top position of their evaluation system and wanting to “成为 cheng2wei2 (to become)” part of it, “走向 zou3xiang4 (to walk to)” it, and be well-known by people in other parts of it to keep connecting with it.

Sections The contrast of overall collocational and semantic associational behavior between world and 世界 shi4jie4, The contrast of clusters in respect of their collocational and semantic associational behaviors, and The contrast of colligational behaviors between world and 世界 shi4jie4 demonstrated the collocational and colligational behaviors of frequently used word sequences across the two languages. The data showed that both world and 世界 shi4jie4 preferred to appear in the phrase of in the world/世界上 shi4jie4shang4. The collocates co-occurred within a four-word span of the two node phrases generalized a similar semantic meaning, i.e., SUPERLATIVE. However, the divergence resides in their preference for grammatical positions. While in the world was strongly primed to occur at the postmodification position, 世界上 shi4jie4shang4 was primed to occur at the premodification position. We tentatively apply the cultural psychology concept of personal identity to explain this phenomenon. Personality, according to Fellmann (2017, p. 1,588), “...is often experienced by individuals as a kind of mental fluctuations.” It is latent in the individual and integrated society. Political and economic structures are important factors in society; however, the more important or core factor is “ideological frameworks” (Fellmann, 2017). Western people's view of personhood emphasizes separating oneself from others, while Asian people emphasizes human beings' fundamental connectedness to each other. The world of Confucius, like China, is “a patriarchal construction of cultural psychology in which hierarchy and geometrical order dominate” (Fellmann, 2017, p. 1,588). This way of thinking habitually positions the most senior, knowledgeable, or authoritative person or thing as the arbiter of truth or moral order. This “authority-minded” (Shi and Feng, 2010, p. 560) way of thinking influences China's ethical system of social hierarchy.

This cultural psychological pattern accounts for Chinese speakers' preference for placing 世界上 shi4jie4shang4 at the position of premodifier to emphasize the following noun head, because 世界 shi4jie4 was viewed as the most authoritative and powerful entity in the physical evaluation system. An example is the Chinese way of writing an address, which places “China” at the very beginning, followed by subordinate levels of governance. In contrast, Western countries are more likely to be open societies, in direct opposition to the dominant culture of closed or traditional societies. They view themselves as independent of collectives, are less likely to recognize authorities, and prioritize their preferences, needs, and goals. This cultural psychological pattern could account for their habitual application of in the world at the post-position to the noun head, because they do not recognize world as an authority to be privileged over the noun head.

The data collection sections found no unique word sequences in the two languages. The shared clusters differ in terms of either frequencies or collocates appearing adjacent to them. For example, as shown in Section The contrast of clusters in respect of their collocational and semantic associational behaviors, the second world war pair was found in both languages. However, co-occurrence counts and LogDice showed a cross-linguistic variation in users' frequency and likelihood of picking up this sequence. English speakers strongly tend to use the word sequence in a semantic meaning of war PARTICIPANTS. Although occasionally associating this sequence with a similar meaning, Chinese speakers prefer applying it in the context of talking about the war's AFTERMATH and tend to avoid using it in their daily communication. While English language users demonstrate a strong preference for picking up the word sequence of the second world war, Chinese speakers are strongly primed to use the word sequence of 世界各地 shi4jie4ge4di4 (every corner of the world) and prefer to associate it with a meaning of TRAVELING. Its English equivalent could be found in BNC, but with rather low frequency. This phenomenon could be accounted for from the perspective of individualism-collectivism, one of the most heavily researched dimensions of cultural psychology. The essence of individualism is the belief that the self is a self-contained, independent entity (Markus and Kitayama, 1991 cited in Chiu and Hong, 2005, p. 26); the essence of collectivism is the belief that the self is interdependent with some ingroup. Yuki (2003) further distinguished between the collective self and the relational self, with the former referring to a depersonalized self-defined in terms of prototypical properties shared among group members, and the latter defined by enduring connections and role relations with significant others. He then argued that the relational self is more characteristic of East-Asian collectivism. As the region's largest country, China undoubtedly characterizes itself with this feature to the largest degree. Chinese people emphasize ingroup connectedness or Guanxi. Chang and Lee (2012, p. 298) noted that “The Chinese live in a world with finely defined layers of relationships that make in- and out-groups differentiate gradated rather than binary.” To fix a perfect personal identity, the Chinese must maintain harmonious relations with others, including physical environment or psychological context. Therefore, they TRAVEL the world to obtain more understanding about the living environment to build better relations. In comparison, the English speakers studied seemed driven by their personal goals, emphasizing rational analysis in their relationship with the outside world or others, rather than intuition.

Two key factors of LPT are encountering and accumulating. The cumulative effects of an individual's encounters decide the possibilities of later priming. Each person in a speech community has a unique language that harmonizes with the other speakers to a considerable degree, constructing a language unique to that speech community. However, LPT fails to account for the reasons underlying speakers' decisions in the harmonizing process. Psychologically, a sense of belonging is the fundamental motive behind this behavior. One's participation in a culture is a means of fulfilling one's need to belong. Chiu and Hong (2005, p. 130) noted that a defining feature of a culture group is “the knowledge tradition believed to be mutually shared by the members of the cultural group.” When the need to belong to a group is activated, people who identify strongly with the ingroup will be motivated to adhere to its shared cultural tradition. People tend to view themselves as group members rather than separate individuals. Their need to belong to the ingroup is strengthened either by their realizing that they are different from others or not different from members of the ingroup (Chiu and Hong, 2005). This sense of belongingness explains the priming process in that individuals try to append their unique language usage to their culture's core values, thus formulating that speech community's unified priming.

The study explored an effective way to apply LPT to explain cross-linguistic similarities and differences between English and Chinese. LPT is proposed based on the belief of “psychological association” between words and the mind. By making an analogy between mental concordance and computer concordance, Hoey applied corpus data to indicate the kinds of priming features present for language users. Gries (2012, p. 51) noted that data obtained from corpus linguistics “...are much concerned with things having immediate psycholinguistic and/or cognitive-linguistic relevance.” The data showcased in this paper align with much previous psycholinguistic research. The high frequency of using the clusters or word sequences across the two languages coincides with the “frequency effects” in psycholinguistics. Psycholinguists acknowledge a link between frequently used lexical items and features that trigger activation. By repeatedly encountering a word in a particular context, an individual's knowledge of the word is accumulated; “As social beings and as an integral part of all our animate and inanimate surroundings, we are touched, influenced, and formed by what we are exposed to” (Pace-Sigge, 2013, p. 27). The quantitative data in the present study show that English and Chinese speakers' cumulative effects are influenced by the regularity with which they are exposed to the word and their interactions with their societies. Chinese and English share similarities in collocation, semantic meaning, and colligation, but different priming characteristics, as demonstrated by their tendencies.

First, the quantitative data on collocations and clusters indicate that speakers in both languages have preferences for or repulsions against picking up a particular node and word sequence. They may be primed to associate similar meanings to the node but retrieve different words from their brain. Second, speakers in both languages make distinctive local syntactic options. The colligational data showcased syntactic option tendencies made regarding the node word, in line with lexicalist parsing theories in psycholinguistics, which holds that the recognition of a word or word sequence involves activating its grammatical option to “guide a further combinatory process” (Novick et al., 2003, p. 58). Speakers in distinct speech communities may have similar choices for grammatical functions but differ in their positional appearance choices. Language users' “mental concordances” are created through priming, and one could assume that continued encounters reinforce lexical and syntactical attachments to a particular lexical item in our neural network.

Based on the empirical data drawn from the corpora, we propose that words, in addition to being collocational, semantic associational, and colligational primed, are also culturally primed. To our knowledge, no research has been undertaken to apply or advance LPT in a cross-linguistic context between two genetically different languages, such as English and Chinese. Within the scope of cross-linguistic studies, there is no research accounting for the reasons behind cross-linguistic similarities and differences. The study attempted to apply LPT to interpret the lexical and grammatical features demonstrated by the two languages from a psychological perspective. Additionally, it extends the theory by considering the concept of cultural psychology. As Kashima (2015, p. 11) said, “Culture is neither a savior nor a nemesis; culture is a tool...it helps us to do what it is meant to do.” Corpus linguists and psychologists are urged to develop a better understanding of a person and his or her culture.

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