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

Abstract

a b s t r a c tBehavioral syntactic priming effects during sentence comprehension are typically observed only if both the syntactic structure and lexical head are repeated. In contrast, during production syntactic priming occurs with structure repetition alone, but the effect is boosted by repetition of the lexical head. We used fMRI to investigate the neuronal correlates of syntactic priming and lexical boost effects during sentence production and comprehension. The critical measure was the magnitude of fMRI adaptation to repetition of sentences in active or passive voice, with or without verb repetition. In conditions with repeated verbs, we observed adaptation to structure repetition in the left IFG and MTG, for active and passive voice. However, in the absence of repeated verbs, adaptation occurred only for passive sentences. None of the fMRI adaptation effects yielded differential effects for production versus comprehension, suggesting that sentence comprehension and production are subserved by the same neuronal infrastructure for syntactic processing.

Shared abstract representation of linguistic structure in bilingual sentence comprehension

“…This is the first demonstration of abstract structural crosslinguistic priming in comprehension. The results are consistent with recent demonstrations of abstract comprehension priming in monolingual samples (Pickering et al, 2013;Segaert et al, 2013;Tooley & Bock, 2014). They suggest that bilingual speakers make use of common abstract grammatical representations in comprehension, as has been shown for production.…”

“…Just as recent studies suggest that differences in priming between production and comprehension in monolingual populations might be more apparent than real (Segaert et al, 2013;Tooley & Bock, 2014), we suggest crosslinguistic priming in comprehension is also likely to be abstract. The current study considered this possibility by investigating priming of subject and object relative clauses (RCs) in English-German bilinguals.…”

“…Firstly, although comprehension priming is less often observed in the absence of lexical overlap, abstract comprehension priming has been attested in several studies (Nitschke, Serratrice, & Kidd, 2014;Pickering, McLean, & Branigan, 2013;Thothathiri & Snedeker, 2009;Traxler, 2008). Secondly, two recent studies using different methodologies have directly compared priming across modalities and (i) have observed abstract priming in comprehension in the absence of lexical overlap, and (ii) have not found differences between priming effects in comprehension versus production (fMRI data: Segaert, Kempen, Petersson, & Hagoort, 2013;behavioural data: Tooley & Bock, 2014). These data suggest that, at least in monolingual speakers, priming across modalities is supported by a unitary processing mechanism.…”

Components of the Language-Ready Brain

“…We have already discussed Broca's area and the ATL; other language-related areas that are typically activated by this contrast include the left posterior temporal lobe and the angular gyrus (Bedny et al, 2011;Pallier et al, 2011;Fedorenko et al, 2012c). The difference between our results and previous studies cannot be attributed solely to the differences between production and comprehension; several production studies have revealed effects in these areas (Menenti et al, 2011Segaert et al, 2012Segaert et al, , 2013. As discussed in the introduction, the structurally simple and short sentences that we used minimized demands on working memory and cognitive control, and our stimuli did not encourage rich semantic processing.…”

On the parity of structural persistence in language production and comprehension

“…A modality-general explanation of structural persistence gets a different kind of support from research showing that the brain regions that are active during syntactic processing are largely the same in comprehension and production (Menenti, Gierhan, Segaert, & Hagoort, 2011; Segaert, Menenti, Weber, Petersson, & Hagoort, 2012; Segaert, Kempen, Petersson, & Hagoort, 2013). Segaert and colleagues used fMRI to assess changes in brain activity during parallel comprehension and production tasks that included priming manipulations.…”