How to Prune a Garden Path by Nipping It in the Bud: Fast Priming of Verb Argument Structure

Trueswell, John C.; Kim, Albert E.

doi:10.1006/jmla.1998.2565

Cited by 127 publications

(125 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…The data Whether the constituents of clichés lose their semantic value-that is, whether or not they are fully processed as individual words when occurring in the cliché-is a different issue. There are various pieces of evidence suggesting that the individual words of conventional expressions are indeed analyzed (Konopka & Bock, 2009;Peterson, Burgess, Dell, & Eberhard, 2001;Trueswell & Kim, 1998;Van de Voort & Vonk, 1995); we will return to this point later. But even if it should turn out that the individual components of clichés are not fully analyzed during string processing, in these expressions it is still the case that the meaning is the result of the composition of their individual words.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…But as appealing as it may be, several pieces of evidence suggest that it may not be correct. First of all, it has been often observed that that syntactic analysis is compulsory and automatic (Boland, Tanenhaus, & Garnsey, 1990;Miller & Johnson-Laird, 1976;Stroop, 1935;Trueswell & Kim, 1998). In other words, it cannot simply be suspended when more "economic" strategies, such as retrieval, are available.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Why are idioms recognized fast?

2009

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It is an established fact that idiomatic expressions are fast to process. However, the explanation of the phenomenon is controversial. Using a semantic judgment paradigm, where people decide whether a string is meaningful or not, the present experiment tested the predictions deriving from the three main theories of idiom recognition-the lexical representation hypothesis, the idiom decomposition hypothesis, and the configuration hypothesis. Participants were faster at judging decomposable idioms, nondecomposable idioms, and clichés than at judging their matched controls. The effect was comparable for all conventional expressions. The results were interpreted as suggesting that, as posited by the configuration hypothesis, the fact that they are known expressions, rather than idiomaticity, explains their fast recognition.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 95%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why are idioms recognized fast?

2009

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“…Confirming this idea, verb-bound syntactic preferences have been found to affect syntactic processing (Melinger & Dobel, 2005;Trueswell & Kim, 1998;Trueswell, Tanenhaus, & Kello, 1993). Single verbs presented in isolation changed the likelihood for the speaker to select one alternative structure instead of the other (Melinger & Dobel, 2005;Salamoura & Williams, 2006).…”

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confidence: 84%

The influence of verb-bound syntactic preferences on the processing of syntactic structures.

Weber¹,

Cladder-Micus²,

Hagoort³

2014

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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Speakers sometimes repeat syntactic structures across sentences, a phenomenon called syntactic priming. We investigated the influence of verb-bound syntactic preferences on syntactic priming effects in response choices and response latencies for German ditransitive sentences. In the response choices we found inverse preference effects: There were stronger syntactic priming effects for primes in the less preferred structure, given the syntactic preference of the prime verb. In the response latencies we found positive preference effects: There were stronger syntactic priming effects for primes in the more preferred structure, given the syntactic preference of the prime verb. These findings provide further support for the idea that syntactic processing is lexically guided.

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“…Although early experimental work appeared to support this hypothesis (Clifton, Frazier & Randall, 1983, Ferreira & Henderson, 1990Mitchell, 1987), a large body of work now indicates that verb-specific biases have a strong and immediate influence in real-time processing (Garnsey, Pearlmutter, Meyers, & Lotocky, 1997;Snedeker & Trueswell, 2004;Trueswell & Kim, 1998;Trueswell, Tanenhaus, & Kello, 1993;but cf. Kennison 2001).…”

Section: Verb Argument Structures In Sentence Processingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Acquiring and processing verb argument structure: Distributional learning in a miniature language

Wonnacott

Newport

Tanenhaus

2008

Cognitive Psychology

193

218

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Adult knowledge of a language involves correctly balancing lexically-based and more languagegeneral patterns. For example, verb-argument structures may sometimes readily generalize to new verbs, yet with particular verbs may resist generalization. From the perspective of acquisition, this creates significant learnability problems (Baker 1979), with some researchers claiming a crucial role for verb semantics in the determination of when generalization may and may not occur (Pinker, 1989). Similarly, there has been debate regarding how verb-specific and more generalized constraints interact in sentence processing (Trueswell et al 1993;Mitchell 1987) and on the role of semantics in this process (Hare et al 2003). The current work explores these issues using artificial language learning. In three experiments using languages without semantic cues to verb distribution, we demonstrate that learners can acquire both verb-specific and verb-general patterns, based on distributional information in the linguistic input regarding each of the verbs as well as across the language as a whole. As with natural languages, these factors are shown to affect production, judgments and real-time processing. We demonstrate that learners apply a rational procedure in determining their usage of these different input-statistics and conclude by suggesting that a Bayesian perspective on statistical learning may be an appropriate framework for capturing our findings.

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How to Prune a Garden Path by Nipping It in the Bud: Fast Priming of Verb Argument Structure

Cited by 127 publications

References 27 publications

Why are idioms recognized fast?

Why are idioms recognized fast?

The influence of verb-bound syntactic preferences on the processing of syntactic structures.

Acquiring and processing verb argument structure: Distributional learning in a miniature language

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