Testing the automaticity of syntax using masked visual priming

Abstract

Language comprehension proceeds at a very fast pace. It is argued that context influences the speed of language comprehension by providing informative cues for the correct processing of the incoming linguistic input. Priming studies investigating the role of context in language processing have shown that humans quickly recognise target words that share orthographic, morphological, or semantic information with their preceding primes. How syntactic information influences the processing of incoming words is however less known. Early syntactic priming studies reported faster recognition for noun and verb targets (e.g., apple or sing) following primes with which they form grammatical phrases or sentences (the apple, he sings). The studies however leave open a number of questions about the reported effect, including the degree of automaticity of syntactic priming, the facilitative versus inhibitory nature, and the specific mechanism underlying the priming effect—that is, the type of syntactic information primed on the target word. Here we employed a masked syntactic priming paradigm in four behavioural experiments in German language to test whether masked primes automatically facilitate the categorization of nouns and verbs presented as flashing visual words. Overall, we found robust syntactic priming effects with masked primes—thus suggesting high automaticity of the process—but only when verbs were morpho-syntactically marked (er kau-t; he chew-s). Furthermore, we found that, compared to baseline, primes slow down target categorisation when the relationship between prime and target is syntactically incorrect, rather than speeding it up when the prime-target relationship is syntactically correct. This argues in favour of an inhibitory nature of syntactic priming. Overall, the data indicate that humans automatically extract abstract syntactic features from word categories as flashing visual words, which has an impact on the speed of successful language processing during language comprehension.

Syntax through the looking glass: A review on two-word linguistic processing across behavioral, neuroimaging and neurostimulation studies

“…Conversely, a determiner in the nominative case would suggest the analysis of the upcoming word via a lemma search, which takes equal time for nouns and verbs. Indeed, in Experiment 3 Pyatigorskaya et al (2021) showed no automatic syntactic priming when the target verbs were irregular forms, which are not morphologically decomposed. Overall, this study supports the notion that syntactic context can automatically influence how categories are accessed (Experiment 2) and that grammaticality effects rely, for some type of constituents, on morphological marking.…”

“…2 We here use the general term "syntactic priming", as in the first (Goodman et al, 1981) and most recent (Berkovitch & Dehaene, 2019;Pyatigorskaya et al, 2021) applications of the paradigm. To avoid confusion, we make it explicit here that the effect we describe is different from the structural priming effect (Bock, 1986), sometimes also called "syntactic priming", which refers to the facilitation observed in processing or producing two sentences with the same grammatical structure.…”

“…More recent studies addressed the automaticity of syntactic priming via the subliminal presentation of the prime word (Ansorge et al, 2013;Berkovitch & Dehaene, 2019;Pyatigorskaya et al, 2021), using the masking technique to suppress its conscious perception. In a first series of experiments in German, Ansorge et al (2013) tested whether the gender of a noun could be primed by a masculine or feminine determiner presented subliminally, and if this effect would depend on specific task demands.…”

“…A recent study employing masked and unmasked priming in German provided converging evidence for effects at the abstract categorical level (Pyatigorskaya et al, 2021). Adapting the design of Berkovitch and Dehaene (2019) (Experiment 3), the authors employed the determiner ("Ein", a) and the pronoun ("Er", he) as primes, and nouns and verbs as targets.…”

“…Notably, this effect was reliable both with unmasked and masked presentation of the prime, albeit reduced in magnitude for the latter setting. In Experiment 2, Pyatigorskaya et al (2021) included an additional baseline condition, in which the target words were preceded by the non-words primes "Ftn" and "Fr", matching in length and orthographic properties "Ein" and "Er" respectively. As in Experiment 1, syntactic priming was observed both in masked and unmasked setting.…”