CiteULike: briordan syntactic-priming

Give and take: Syntactic priming during spoken language comprehension

Malathi Thothathiri — 2008-06-07T12:05:46-00:00

Cognition, Vol. 108, No. 1. (July 2008), pp. 51-68.

Syntactic priming during language production is pervasive and well-studied. Hearing, reading, speaking or writing a sentence with a given structure increases the probability of subsequently producing the same structure, regardless of whether the prime and target share lexical content. In contrast, syntactic priming during comprehension has proven more elusive, fueling claims that comprehension is less dependent on general syntactic representations and more dependent on lexical knowledge. In three experiments we explored syntactic priming during spoken language comprehension. Participants acted out double-object (DO) or prepositional-object (PO) dative sentences while their eye movements were recorded. Prime sentences used different verbs and nouns than the target sentences. In target sentences, the onset of the direct-object noun was consistent with both an animate recipient and an inanimate theme, creating a temporary ambiguity in the argument structure of the verb (DO e.g., Show the horse the book; PO e.g., Show the horn to the dog). We measured the difference in looks to the potential recipient and the potential theme during the ambiguous interval. In all experiments, participants who heard DO primes showed a greater preference for the recipient over the theme than those who heard PO primes, demonstrating across-verb priming during online language comprehension. These results accord with priming found in production studies, indicating a role for abstract structural information during comprehension as well as production.

Structural priming: A critical review

Martin Pickering — 2008-05-04T17:30:18-00:00

Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 134, No. 3. (May 2008), pp. 427-459.

Expectation-based syntactic comprehension

Roger Levy — 2008-02-12T16:52:00-00:00

Cognition, Vol. 106, No. 3. (March 2008), pp. 1126-1177.

This paper investigates the role of resource allocation as a source of processing difficulty in human sentence comprehension. The paper proposes a simple information-theoretic characterization of processing difficulty as the work incurred by resource reallocation during parallel, incremental, probabilistic disambiguation in sentence comprehension, and demonstrates its equivalence to the theory of Hale [Hale, J. (2001). A probabilistic Earley parser as a psycholinguistic model. In Proceedings of NAACL (Vol. 2, pp. 159-166)], in which the difficulty of a word is proportional to its surprisal (its negative log-probability) in the context within which it appears. This proposal subsumes and clarifies findings that high-constraint contexts can facilitate lexical processing, and connects these findings to well-known models of parallel constraint-based comprehension. In addition, the theory leads to a number of specific predictions about the role of expectation in syntactic comprehension, including the reversal of locality-based difficulty patterns in syntactically constrained contexts, and conditions under which increased ambiguity facilitates processing. The paper examines a range of established results bearing on these predictions, and shows that they are largely consistent with the surprisal theory.

Syntactic priming during language comprehension in three- and four-year-old children

Malathi Thothathiri — 2007-12-17T16:58:25-00:00

Journal of Memory and Language, Vol. In Press, Corrected Proof

We report two sets of experiments that demonstrate syntactic priming from comprehension to comprehension in young children. Children acted out double-object and prepositional-object dative sentences while we monitored their eye movements. We measured whether hearing one type of dative as a prime influenced children's online interpretation of subsequent dative utterances. In target sentences, the onset of the direct object noun was consistent with both an animate recipient and an inanimate theme, creating a temporary ambiguity in the argument structure of the verb (double-object e.g., Show the horse the book; prepositional-object e.g., Show the horn to the dog). The first set of experiments demonstrated priming in four-year-old children (M = 4.1), both when the same verb was used in prime and target sentences (Experiment 1a) and when different verbs were used (Experiment 1b). The second set found parallel priming in three-year-old children (M = 3.1). These results indicate that young children employ abstract structural representations during online sentence comprehension.

Lexically independent priming in online sentence comprehension

Matthew Traxler — 2008-01-29T13:56:20-00:00

pp. 149-155.

Two eye-tracking experiments investigated what happens when people read pairs of sentences that have the same syntactic structure. Previous experiments have shown priming in online sentence processing only when critical lexical material overlaps between the prime and the target sentence. In the current study, participants were asked to read sentences containing modifier-goal ambiguities. Half of the target sentences were preceded by sentences with the same structure, and half were preceded by sentences with a different structure. In Experiment 1, the prime-target pairs had the same main verb. In Experiment 2, the prime-target pairs had different main verbs. Facilitated target sentence processing was observed in both Experiments 1 and 2 when the target sentences were preceded by a prime sentence with the same syntactic structure. These results provide the first evidence of lexically independent, between-sentence structural priming in online sentence comprehension.

Priming ditransitive structures in comprehension

Manabu Arai — 2008-01-17T02:01:42-00:00

Cognitive Psychology, Vol. 54, No. 3. (May 2007), pp. 218-250.

Many studies have shown evidence for syntactic priming during language production (e.g., Bock, 1986). It is often assumed that comprehension and production share similar mechanisms and that priming also occurs during comprehension (e.g., Pickering & Garrod, 2004). Research investigating priming during comprehension (e.g., Branigan et al., 2005 and Scheepers and Crocker, 2004) has mainly focused on syntactic ambiguities that are very different from the meaning-equivalent structures used in production research. In two experiments, we investigated whether priming during comprehension occurs in ditransitive sentences similar to those used in production research. When the verb was repeated between prime and target, we observed a priming effect similar to that in production. However, we observed no evidence for priming when the verbs were different. Thus, priming during comprehension occurs for very similar structures as priming during production, but in contrast to production, the priming effect is completely lexically dependent.

Predicting the dative alternation

Joan Bresnan — 2007-12-14T16:17:56-00:00

pp. 69-94.

Processing verb argument structure across languages: Evidence for shared representations in the bilingual lexicon

Angeliki Salamoura — 2007-10-03T03:09:51-00:00

Applied Psycholinguistics, Vol. 28 (2007), pp. 627-660.

Although the organization of first language (L1) and second language (L2) lexicosemantic information has been extensively studied in the bilingual literature, little evidence exists concerning how syntactic information associated with words is represented across languages. The present study examines the shared or independent nature of the representation of verb argument structure in the bilingual mental lexicon and the contribution of constituent order and thematic role information in these representations. In three production tasks, Greek (L1) advanced learners of English (L2) generated an L1 prime structure (Experiment 1: prepositional object [PO] and double object [DO] structures; Experiment 2: PO, DO, and intransitive structures; Experiment 3: PO, DO, locative, and “provide (someone) with (something)” structures) before completing an L2 target structure (PO or DO only). Experiment 1 showed L1-to-L2 syntactic priming; participants tended to reuse L1 structure when producing L2 utterances. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that this tendency was contingent on the combination of both syntactic structure and thematic roles up to the first postverbal argument. Based on these findings, we outline a model of shared representations of syntactic and thematic information for L1 and L2 verbs in the bilingual lexicon.