The Representation of Verbs: Evidence from Syntactic Priming in Language Production

Abstract

We report five experiments that investigate syntactic priming (Bock, 1986b) using a written completion task. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that priming occurs if the prime and target contain different verbs, but that stronger priming occurs if the verb is repeated. Experiment 1 also showed that priming occurs even if the detailed structure of prime and target differ. Experiments 3, 4, and 5 found that priming was unaffected by whether tense, aspect, or number of the verb stayed the same or differed between prime and target. We argue that these results provide evidence about the representation of syntactic information within the lemma stratum. We use these results to extend the model proposed by Roelofs (1992Roelofs ( , 1993. In particular, we argue that combinatorial information is phrasal in nature, is associated with the verb's lemma rather than a particular form of the verb, and is shared between different lemmas.

Can thematic roles leave traces of their places?

“…Crucially, they do so regardless of whether the verb (or other words) used in the structurally primed utterance is the same as the verb in the priming sentence. Although the repetition of words increases the magnitude of structural priming (Cleland & Pickering, 2002;Pickering & Branigan, 1998), it is not essential to the occurrence of priming.…”

“…Structural priming increases substantially when there is lexical and semantic overlap between prime and target sentences (Cleland & Pickering, 2002;Pickering & Branigan, 1998), suggesting that lexical support increases the likelihood of priming between sentences. Likewise, overlap in thematic roles may increase priming, according to findings from Hare and Goldberg (2000).…”

The influence of verb-bound syntactic preferences on the processing of syntactic structures.

“…The former explanation can account for short-term (the activation of the lexical item decays quickly) lexical influences on syntactic priming like the "lexical boost." This is the phenomenon in which the syntactic priming effects are amplified when not only the syntactic structure but also the lexical head of this structure is repeated (Pickering & Branigan, 1998). However an activation account cannot explain inverse preference effects.…”

“…On average, for structural nodes with high base-level activation, the amount of activation that needs to be sent to activate the node is lower than the amount of activation that needs to be sent to a node with low base-level activation. For sentences following a prime sentence, residual activation will play a role (inspired by Pickering & Branigan, 1998), which, in turn, will influence the response choices. Crucially, the response choices are influenced more strongly following a less preferred than a preferred prime (i.e., an inverse [negative] effect of preference on the response choices): Given that more activation needs to be sent to activate a node with low base-level activation, there is more residual activation for the node This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.…”

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

“…Hartsuiker, Pickering, and Veltkamp (2004) used a structural priming study to show that the structural knowledge of Spanish and English found in Spanish-English bilinguals involves the use of shared (rather than separate) representational features across languages. Finally, and most germane to the focus of this paper, structural priming effects have been used to explore the interaction between lexical and syntactic knowledge during language production (e.g., Pickering & Branigan, 1998;Konopka & Bock, 2005).Whereas most studies of structural priming have explored language production in adults, a number of researchers have employed priming paradigms in order to explore the development of syntactic knowledge in young children (e.g., Huttenlocher, Vasilyeva, & Shimpi, 2004;Savage, Lieven, Theakston, & Tomasello, 2003). Generally speaking, syntactic development in children progresses from a stage in which constructions are largely item-based (e.g., frames such as, "give X") to an endpoint where knowledge of those constructions is abstracted away from the use of particular lexical items (see Tomasello, 2003, for a detailed review).…”