Conceptual structure modulates structural priming in the production of complex sentences

Abstract

Speakers tend to reproduce syntactic structures that they have recently comprehended or produced. This structural or syntactic priming occurs despite differences in the particular conceptual or event roles expressed in prime and target sentences (Bock & Loebell, 1990). In two sentence recall studies, we used the tendency of speakers to paraphrase the finite complements of object-raising verbs as infinitive complements (e.g., "John believed that Mary was nice" as "John believed Mary to be nice") to test whether an additional conceptual role would affect priming. Prime constructions with identical constituent orders as object-raising infinitives but an additional conceptual role ("John persuaded Mary to be nice") resulted in fewer paraphrases. Contrasts with other constructions suggest that the critical difference between primes was this extra conceptual role. Thus, subtle differences in conceptual structures can affect how speakers grammatically encode message elements.The meaning of an utterance constrains the form of its expression. For instance, a speaker who wishes to talk about one thing affecting another thing is more likely to create a sentence with two noun phrases than a sentence with only one noun phrase. Given information about what a speaker intends to express and context of the utterance, there is a limited set of constructions that the speaker can felicitously use. Yet, despite the many systematic meaning-form correlations present in languages, the mappings between them are not always one-to-one (for discussion, see e.g., Givón, 1995; Goldberg, 1995; Lambrecht, 1994;Smith, 2000). Many messages can be expressed by more than one sentence structure. One of the puzzles of sentence production is how utterances end up with the structures they do.In the present study, we used the phenomenon of structural priming to explore the relationships between meaning and form as they relate to constructing sentences. In the

What this construction needs is generalized

“…The finding that repeated exposure to the needs construction facilitates the processing of subsequent examples of the construction is consonant with observations of syntactic priming in language production (e.g., Bock, 1986;Griffin & Weinstein-Tull, 2003;Pickering & Branigan, 1998) and comprehension (e.g., Branigan et al, 2005;Carey et al, 1970). Two theories of structural priming have been proposed.…”

Is long-term structural priming affected by patterns of experience with individual verbs?☆

“…As one particularly well-studied example of this phenomenon, language producers who have recently produced (or comprehended) a double object construction ("Meghan gave her mom a kiss") are more likely to produce another double object construction to describe a transfer event ("Mike sent his boss a postcard") than to produce a prepositional object construction to describe the same event ("Mike sent a postcard to his boss"; see Bock, 1986;Bock & Griffin, 2000;Pickering & Branigan, 1998). Structural priming has been observed with a range of syntactic constructions (e.g., Corley & Scheepers, 2002;Griffin & Weinstein-Tull, 2003;Hartsuiker & Kolk, 1998;Hartsuiker & Westenberg, 2000), and has been observed both in lab tasks (e.g., Bock, 1986;Pickering & Branigan, 1998) and in samples of naturally occurring speech (e.g., Gries, 2005;Weiner & Labov, 1983). Although the repetition of lexical items (e.g., verbs) across utterances has been shown to affect the strength of the priming effects that are observed (e.g., Cleland & Corresponding author.…”

Long-term cumulative structural priming persists for (at least) one week

“…Structural priming is an extremely robust phenomenon. It has been observed in spoken (e.g., Bock, 1986) and written language production (e.g., Cleland & Pickering, 2006), with a range of syntactic constructions (e.g., Griffin & Weinstein-Tull, 2003;Hartsuiker & Kolk, 1998;Hartsuiker & Westenberg, 2000;), in lab tasks (e.g., Bock, 1986;Pickering & Branigan, 1998) and naturally occurring speech (e.g., Gries, 2005;Weiner & Labov, 1983), and across several languages (e.g., Hartsuiker & Kolk, 1998;Hartsuiker, Pickering, & Veltkamp, 2004).…”