Syntactic Persistence in Dutch

Abstract

Three experiments are reported that showed effects of "structure priming," the tendency to repeat syntactic structure across successive sentences. These effects were demonstrated in a previously untested language, Dutch. All experiments studied spoken sentence production. Importantly, pre-experimental baselines were measured for all target structures in order to assess possible effects of frequency on the magnitude of priming effect. We obtained priming with dative sentences, including datives with medially placed prepositional phrases, a sentence type not tested before. In one experiment we obtained priming effects with passives, including passives with sentence-final verbs, which also have never been tested before. However, we failed to obtain priming effects with active transitives. A comparison with the baseline data suggested that priming is not related to baseline frequency. Further, the results allowed us to draw an empirical generalization: Structure priming is a relatively long-term event, lasting at least several trials. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Syntactic priming and the lexical boost effect during sentence production and sentence comprehension: An fMRI study

“…The presence of a lexical boost in active sentences, also in both modalities, is in line with behavioral studies. The fact that we did not find any syntactic priming for active sentences in the absence of verb repetition does not contradict with the results of earlier production experiments, which typically found syntactic priming effects on syntactic choices for passives but not for actives (experiment 2 and 3 of Bock, 1986;Bock & Loebell, 1990;Hartsuiker & Kolk, 1998). Very few production experiments did observe effects for actives, and these were always smaller than for passives (Bernolet, Hartsuiker, & Pickering, 2009; experiment 1 of Bock, 1986).…”

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

“…These studies demonstrate that the relative frequency with which the double object and prepositional object constructions are produced in the first phase of the experiment has a strong effect on the rate at which those constructions are produced in the second phase of the experiment. That is, there is a long-term structural priming effect that accumulates over many productions of the double object and prepositional object constructions (cf., Bock & Kroch, 1989;Hartsuiker & Kolk, 1998;Hartsuiker & Westenberg, 2000).…”

“…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.…”

“…These studies demonstrate that the relative frequency with which the double object and prepositional object constructions are produced in the first phase of the experiment has a strong effect on the rate at which those constructions are produced in the second phase of the experiment. That is, there is a long-term structural priming effect that accumulates over many productions of the double object and prepositional object constructions (cf., Bock & Kroch, 1989;Hartsuiker & Kolk, 1998;Hartsuiker & Westenberg, 2000).One question that can be asked within Kaschak and colleagues' paradigm is whether the long-term structural priming effects that they observe will be affected by structural factors alone (e.g., the relative frequency of double object and prepositional object constructions in the experiment), or if they will be affected by lexical factors (e.g., the frequency with which particular verbs are used in the double object and prepositional object constructions in the experiment (2006) should be unaffected by patterns of experience with particular lexical items in the experiment. On the other hand, because Pickering and Branigan's (1998) model uses the relationship between particular words and particular syntactic rules as its basis for producing structural priming effects, this model predicts that long-term priming effects should be affected by patterns of experience with particular lexical items in the experiment.…”

The functions of structural priming

“…Structural priming has been observed in English (e.g., Bock, 1986), Dutch (e.g., Hartsuiker & Kolk, 1998), and German (e.g., Loebell & Bock, 2003;Scheepers, 2003). In sum, structural priming is a wide-ranging phenomenon, manifests in different settings, different languages, and with different linguistic structures.…”