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Abstract:
Structural priming provides the strongest evidence
for the existence of processes that build the forms of sentences
independent of individual words and the meanings that the
sentences convey (Bock, 1986; Bock & Loebell, 1990).
The basic finding is that people tend to repeat the structure of
a sentence they have previously used (Bock, 1986; Bock &
Loebell, 1990, Branigan et al.,1995; Potter and Lombardi,
1998). One way to elicit structural priming experimentally
is shown in the example below. Studies have shown that
structural priming occurs even when primes and targets do not
overlap in content words, function words (Bock, 1986, 1989), or
semantic roles (Bock & Loebell, 1990), suggesting that the
locus of the effect is at the level of abstract constituent
structure. Another hypothesis is that the generalizations
are less abstract, grounded in meaning (Hare & Goldberg,
1999) or specific function words associated with syntactic
frames. To date no single study clearly distinguishes these
hypotheses. The key demonstration of priming without
overlap in semantics was Bock and Loebell (1990, Experiment
2). They found that by-passives and intransitive locatives
were equally effective primes for passives, relative to active
controls. This suggests that meaning overlap is not
necessary for priming, because the semantic roles in locatives
and by passives are uncontroversially distinct. In passives
like "The 747 was alerted by the control tower", control tower is
the agent of the action. In a locative with the same
structure ("The 747 was landing by the control tower"), control
tower plays the role of location. However, the materials
did not rule out a contribution from the function words.
The intransitive locative primes shared with the passives the
auxiliary be and the preposition by. The present study was
designed to determine whether the priming of by-passives from
intransitive locatives is in part due to the preposition by,
providing a more stringent test of the hypothesis that priming is
abstract and operates at the level of constituent
structure. We replicated the results of Bock and Loebell,
finding priming of passives from both passives and locatives with
the preposition by. However the results showed that by was
necessary for priming to occur: locatives without by showed no
priming. Thus these data indicate that the relevant
generalizations for structural priming are at a level less
abstract than pure constituent structure.
Example
[A priming trial in a structural priming
experiment] Participants hear and repeat a priming
sentence such as "The new graduate was hired by the software
company." They then see and describe a pictured event, for
example the picture of a dog chasing a mailman. They might
say something like "The mailman is being chased by an angry
poodle." On the same trial another group of participants
hears and repeats the sentence "The new graduate left the
software company." Structural priming is said to occur when
participants match the structure of the sentence prime in their
subsequent picture description.
References
Bock, J. K. (1986). Syntactic persistence in
language production. Cognitive Psychology, 18,
355-387.
Bock, J. K. (1989). Closed-class immanence
in sentence production. Cognition, 31, 163-186.
Bock, K., & Loebell, H. (1990). Framing
sentences. Cognition, 35, 1-39.
Branigan et al. (1995). Syntactic priming:
Investigating the mental representation of language.
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 24, 489-506.
Hare, M., & Goldberg, A. (1999).
Structural priming, purely syntactic? Cog. Sci.
Proceedings, 208-211.
Potter, M., & Lombardi, L. (1998).
Syntactic priming in immediate recall of sentences. Journal
of Memory and Language, 38, 265:282
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