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Abstract:
Previous studies using priming to investigate mono-lingual
sentence production (e.g. Bock, 1986; Bock et al., 1992) have
concluded that priming is based on syntactic form. However, this
interpretation is not clear-cut, since in English, syntax, word
order and focus are linked in such a way that if sentences like
(1) prime active rather than passive responses and the opposite
applies with sentences like (2), it could be the syntactic form
that is crucial, or the fact that in (1), the agent is the most
salient element of the message, whereas in (2), the patient is
most salient.
(1) A consultant is advising the manager.
(2) The manager is being advised by a consultant.
Using a cross-linguistic priming procedure from German to
English, Heydel and Murray (1996; 1997) demonstrated that it is
possible to isolate effects arising from aspects of 'conceptual
form', such as focus, from those attributable to syntax. German
actives are syntactically and conceptually similar to English
actives, and were found to prime English active responses. German
passives similarly primed English passive responses. However,
German Topicalizations, which are actives and syntactically
similar to English actives, but conceptually similar to passives,
were found to prime passive responses in English. Heydel and
Murray therefore concluded that there was an underlying
conceptual basis to this type of priming and that, given the
apparent similarity in the size of monolingual and
cross-linguistic priming effects, the same may be true of
monolingual priming.
The two studies reported here address the question of whether
such a conclusion can be sustained or whether 'conceptual
effects' arise because of the particular nature of the
cross-linguistic procedure. The first experiment involved
explicit translation from German to English, using the same
general procedure. This showed a different pattern of results
from cross-linguistic priming, demonstrating that the conceptual
effect is not due to an element of translation. It is also clear
that it cannot be attributed to the priming of only one possible
structure. The second study used an English monolingual variant
of the cross-linguistic procedure and produced priming results of
an identical magnitude to those found in the cross-linguistic
study. There therefore appears to be no reason to conclude that
the cross-linguistic effects reflect the operation of processes
which differ from those that apply in mono-lingual sentence
priming. We conclude that the results obtained in
cross-linguistic sentence priming are reliable and are likely to
reflect mechanisms and procedures which are shared by
mono-lingual sentence production.
Bock, K.J. (1986). Syntactic persistence in language production.
Cognitive Psychology
18, 355--387.
Bock, K.J., Loebell, H., and Morey, R. (1992). From conceptual
roles to syntactic relations: Bridging the syntactic cleft.
Psychological Review
99, 150--171.
Heydel, M., and Murray, W.S. (1996). Conceptual effects in
cross-linguistic sentence priming. Architectures and Mechanisms
for Language Processing Conference, Turin.
Heydel, M., and Murray, W.S. (1997). Conceptual form and the
basis of sentence priming: Cross-linguistic evidence. CUNY
Sentence Processing Conference, Santa Monica.
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