Syntactic priming in comprehension: The role of argument order and animacy.

Abstract

Two visual-world eye-movement experiments investigated the nature of syntactic priming during comprehension--specifically, whether the priming effects in ditransitive prepositional object (PO) and double object (DO) structures (e.g., "The wizard will send the poison to the prince/the prince the poison?") are due to anticipation of structural properties following the verb (send) in the target sentence or to anticipation of animacy properties of the first postverbal noun. Shortly following the target verb onset, listeners looked at the recipient more (relative to the theme) following DO than PO primes, indicating that the structure of the prime affected listeners' eye gazes on the target scene. Crucially, this priming effect was the same irrespective of whether the postverbal nouns in the prime sentences did ("The monarch will send the painting to the president") or did not ("The monarch will send the envoy to the president") differ in animacy, suggesting that PO/DO priming in comprehension occurs because structural properties, rather than animacy features, are being primed when people process the ditransitive target verb.

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

“…In the behavioral and ERP literature, findings of syntactic priming in comprehension seem to be almost completely dependent on repetition of the head-word (Arai et al, 2007;Branigan et al, 2005;Carminati et al, 2008;Ledoux et al, 2007;Tooley et al, 2009;Traxler & Tooley, 2007). On the other hand, syntactic priming in production is often observed without lexical repetition (e.g.…”

“…Bock, 1986;Bock & Loebell, 1990) or in faster speech onsets for repeated syntactic structures (Corley & Scheepers, 2002;Segaert, Menenti, Weber, & Hagoort, 2011;Smith & Wheeldon, 2001;Wheeldon & Smith, 2003;Wheeldon, Smith, & Apperly, 2011). Syntactic priming in comprehension is shown in anticipatory eye-movements to pictures (Arai, van Gompel, & Scheepers, 2007;Carminati, van Gompel, Scheepers, & Arai, 2008;Thothathiri & Snedeker, 2008a;Traxler, 2008), in faster reading (Traxler & Tooley, 2008) and in picture-matching choices for ambiguous phrases (Branigan, Pickering, & McLean, 2005). In comprehension tasks, ERP studies revealed the attenuation of the P600 amplitude as a result of syntactic priming (Ledoux, Traxler, & Swaab, 2007;Tooley, Traxler, & Swaab, 2009).…”

“…Syntactic priming in comprehension seems to be dependent on repetition of the head-word (usually a verb: Arai et al, 2007; 0093-934X/$ -see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2012.12.003 2005;Carminati et al, 2008;Ledoux et al, 2007;Tooley et al, 2009;Traxler & Tooley, 2007). Strikingly, so far only three comprehension studies reported syntactic priming independent from verb repetition (Thothathiri & Snedeker, 2008a,b;Traxler, 2008).…”

Priming Younger and Older Adults’ Sentence Comprehension: Insights from Dynamic Emotional Facial Expressions and Pupil Size Measures

“…In line with their expectations, facilitation through the facial prime emerged rapidly (as soon as the sentence referenced one or the other IAPS picture) and occurred for the older adults with positive sentences only. For the younger adults, facilitation emerged with negative sentences only, and/or (depending on the time region considered) to a lesser extent for positive sentences (see [24] for a description of possible patterns consistent with a positivity effect and see [25,26] on gaze patterns reflecting processing facilitation).…”

Words with friends

“…In addition, the pervasiveness of animacy distinctions in human language (e.g., Comrie, 1989;Corbett, 1979;Dahl, 2008;Givón, 1976;Ransom, 1977;Zaenen et al, 2004), and the reliable influence of animacy on many sentence processing measures (e.g., Altmann & Kemper, 2006;Branigan et al, 2008;Carminati, van Gompel, Scheepers, & Arai, 2008;F. Ferreira, 1994; G. W. Humphreys et al, 2016;Szewczyk & Schriefers, 2011) would argue that, if HN-LN relatedness on any semantic feature is likely to have an influence on mismatch effects, it would be animacy.…”