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

Abstract

Several recent papers have reported long-term structural priming effects in experiments where previous patterns of experience with the double object and prepositional object constructions are shown to affect later patterns of language production for those constructions. The experiments reported in this paper address the extent to which these long-term priming effects are modulated by the participants' patterns of experience with particular verbs within the double object and prepositional object constructions. The results of three experiments show that patterns of experience with particular verbs using the double object or prepositional object constructions do not have much effect on the shape of the longterm structural priming effects reported elsewhere in the literature. These findings lend support to the claim that structural priming is the result of adaptations to the language production system that occur on an abstract, structural level of representation that is separate from representations regarding the behavior of particular lexical items in particular constructions [e.g., Chang, F., Dell, G. S., & Bock, K. (2006). Becoming syntactic. Psychological Review, 113,. 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. KeywordsLanguage production; Structural priming; Lexical effects Structural priming refers to the tendency for speakers (or writers) to repeat syntactic structures across utterances (Bock, 1986). 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. Fax: +1 850 644 7739. kaschak@psy.fsu.edu (M.P. Kaschak). HHS Public Access Author Manuscript Author ManuscriptAuthor ManuscriptAuthor Manuscript Pickering, 2003;Pickering & Branigan, 1998), the hallmark of structural priming effects is that they arise in the absence of such lexical repetition (Bock, 1986(Bock, , 1989.Structural priming is of interest to psycholinguists (and other cognitive scientists) for several reasons. First, the presence (or absence) of structural priming between different kinds of sentences provides insight into the nature of the representations that und...

Implicit and Explicit Memory Factors in Cumulative Structural Priming

“…Kaschak and Borreggine (2008) discuss the possibility that the presence of stronger cumulative priming for one particular verb in their Experiment 2 may have been the result of the participants explicitly noting the form of the verb used in the experiment (lent as the past tense of lend, which is an unusual choice for the students in our participant pool). Furthermore, unpublished studies from our lab suggest that verb-based learning of structural biases, such as that reported in Coyle and Kaschak (2008), is stronger when the participants notice the verb that is being manipulated.…”

Structural priming of adjective–noun structures in hearing and deaf children

“…Obviously, more research is needed to examine the viability of the residual activation and implicit learning accounts of structural priming and lexically boosted priming (cf. Hartsuiker et al, 2008;Kaschak & Borreggine, 2008). To fully understand the basic mechanisms, it is important to examine both child and adult language users.…”

Structural Priming as Structure‐Mapping: Children Use Analogies From Previous Utterances to Guide Sentence Production

“…The priming of sentence structure, known as structural priming, has recently seen a surge of interest (e.g., Bock & Griffin, 2000;Chang, Dell, & Bock, 2006;Kaschak & Borreggine, 2008;Pickering & Garrod, 2004). Structural priming is analogous to other instances of priming wherein primed material is easier to access, in that primed grammatical constructions become more likely to be repeated across utterances.…”