English and Dutch: The passive difference

Cornelis, Louise

doi:10.1016/0388-0001(96)00018-6

Cited by 16 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…Syntactic priming has previously been shown to be affected by both prior and recent experience, in corpus analyses as well as experimental paradigms, which is in accordance with an expectation adaptation account of syntactic priming (Jaeger & Snider, 2013). Prior experience constitutes our experiences that passives are produced infrequently (about 8% in Dutch: Cornelis, 1996). Cumulative Passive Proportion is a measure of more recent experience with passives.…”

Section: The Present Studysupporting

confidence: 58%

Unifying structural priming effects on syntactic choices and timing of sentence generation

Segaert

Wheeldon

Hagoort

2016

Journal of Memory and Language

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We investigated whether structural priming of production latencies is sensitive to the same factors known to influence persistence of structural choices: structure preference, cumulativity and verb repetition. In two experiments, we found structural persistence only for passives (inverse preference effect) while priming effects on latencies were stronger for the actives (positive preference effect). We found structural persistence for passives to be influenced by immediate primes and long lasting cumulativity (all preceding primes) (Experiment 1), and to be boosted by verb repetition (Experiment 2). In latencies we found effects for actives were sensitive to long lasting cumulativity (Experiment 1). In Experiment 2, in latencies we found priming for actives overall, while for passives the priming effects emerged as the cumulative exposure increased but only when also aided by verb repetition. These findings are consistent with the Two-stage Competition model, an integrated model of structural priming effects for sentence choice and latenc

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Section: The Present Studysupporting

confidence: 58%

Unifying structural priming effects on syntactic choices and timing of sentence generation

Segaert

Wheeldon

Hagoort

2016

Journal of Memory and Language

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“…The percent of passive responses in the baseline phase (as illustrated in Figure 2) are numerically quite small, which is expected. In English (the language of the experiment), passives account for approximately 12% of transitive sentences (Cornelis, 1996). As illustrated in Figure 2, and supported by the statistical output reported in Table 1, there is a significant increase in passive production in the Baseline Phase for both young and older adults for Session B compared to Session A (p = .002; 1.5% increase for young adults; 3.7% increase for older adults).…”

Section: Experiments 1 -Resultssupporting

confidence: 64%

Structural priming persists for (at least) one month in young adults, but not in healthy older adults

Heyselaar¹

2021

Preprint

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Implicit learning theories suggest that we update syntactic knowledge based on prior experience (e.g., (Chang et al., 2006). To determine the limits of the extent to which implicit learning can influence syntactic processing, we investigated whether structural priming effects persist up to one month post-exposure, and whether they persist less long in healthy older (compared to younger) adults. We conducted a longitudinal experiment with three sessions: Session A, session B (one week after A), and session C (four weeks after B). For young adults, we found passive priming effects to persist and accumulate across sessions (one week and four weeks). However, for older adults the effects persisted for one week but not four. This suggests that for young adults, who unlike older adults experience no age-related decline in implicit memory, the limit to the duration of structural priming persistence is longer than four weeks. In a second longitudinal experiment with two sessions one-week apart we found that priming in session A affected syntactic processing in a different, independent task in session B, both for young and older adults. Experiment 2 suggests that implicit persistence of the learned syntax is not limited to a specific context or task. Together, our findings give insight into how structural priming can contribute to language change throughout the lifespan, showing that implicit learning is a pervasive and robust mechanism that contributes to syntactic processing.

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“…6 Thus, none of the passive priming studies provide 6 Bernolet et al (2009) examined the priming of English passives by variants of the Dutch passive: namely, Dutch passives with the by-phrase positioned sentence-initially, -medially, or -finally. Results demonstrated that the medial and final cases serve a function analogous to the English passive in emphasizing the patient argument (see also Cornelis, 1996), and they both primed English passives. However, statistically stronger priming was found for the variant that shared with English both information structure and constituent structure (passives with sentence-final by-phrase) over just information structure alone.…”

Section: Is There Unambiguous Evidence For the Priming Of Abstract Cmentioning

confidence: 87%

How abstract is syntax? Evidence from structural priming

et al. 2019

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In 1990, Bock and Loebell found that passives (e.g., The 747 was radioed by the airport's control tower) can be primed by intransitive locatives (e.g., The 747 was landing by the airport's control tower). This finding is often taken as strong evidence that structural priming occurs on the basis of a syntactic phrase structure that abstracts across lexical content, including prepositions, and is uninfluenced by the semantic roles of the arguments. However, all of the intransitive locative primes in Bock and Loebell contained the preposition by (by-locatives), just like the passive targets. Therefore, the locative-to-passive priming may have been due to the adjunct headed by by, rather than being a result of purely abstract syntax. The present experiment investigates this possibility. We find that passives and intransitive by-locatives are equivalent primes, but intransitive locatives with other prepositions (e.g., The 747 has landed near the airport control tower) do not prime passives. We conclude that a shared abstract, content-less tree structure is not sufficient for passive priming to occur. We then review the prior results that have been offered in favor of abstract tree priming, and note the range of evidence can be considerably narrowed-and possibly eliminated-once effects of animacy, semantic event structure, shared morphology, information structure, and rhythm are taken into account.

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English and Dutch: The passive difference

Cited by 16 publications

References 4 publications

Unifying structural priming effects on syntactic choices and timing of sentence generation

Unifying structural priming effects on syntactic choices and timing of sentence generation

Structural priming persists for (at least) one month in young adults, but not in healthy older adults

How abstract is syntax? Evidence from structural priming

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