Word order priming in written and spoken sentence production

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.…”

Some notes on priming, alignment, and self-monitoring

“…For example, some recent accounts of syntactic priming are based on implicit learning Chang et al 2000), whereas some are based on activation of grammatical nodes (Hartsuiker et al 2004;Pickering & Branigan 1998). Some experimental research finds clear evidence for long-term priming that is largely unaffected by intervening material Hartsuiker & Westenberg 2000), whereas others shows rapid decay (Branigan et al 1999;Levelt & Kelter 1982;Wheeldon & Smith 2003). Most likely, different tasks and sentence types lead to very different time-courses of priming.…”

“…The syntactic structure of the confederate's description strongly influenced the syntactic structure of the experimental subject's description. Branigan et al's work extends "syntactic priming" to dialogue: Bock (1986b) showed that speakers tended to repeat syntactic form under circumstances in which alternative non-syntactic explanations could be excluded (Bock 1989;Bock & Loebell 1990;Bock et al 1992;Hartsuiker & Westenberg 2000;Pickering & Branigan 1998; Potter & Lombardi 1998; cf. Smith &Wheeldon 2001, and see Pickering &Branigan 1999, for a review).…”