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Abstract:
The syntactic priming effect is a fact of life, at
least for psycholinguists it is. After having processed a
sentence in a particular word order, subsequent production or
perception of a new sentence in a similar word order is
facilitated, response bias being the measure most frequently
obtained (however, cf. Smith & Wheeldon's Cognition-2000
paper). The effect is syntactic in nature; semantic,
lexical or phonological factors do not play a role.
Explanations for the effect are usually in terms of effort
reduction. Re-using old material, in this case the
grammatical structure of sentences, saves cognitive resources,
which allows mental capacity to be concerned with non-syntactic
aspects of language processing, lexical retrieval for instance,
instead of with syntax. The question we asked ourselves is:
does syntax recycling indeed reduce cognitive effort, as measured
in reaction time decrease? The answer seems to be yes and
no. Voice Onset Times (VOT's) were recorded for cued
picture descriptions following either syntactically compatible or
incompatible prime sentences. In a series of experiments we
find that a priming effect as measured in VOT decrease for
compatible prime-target pairs does not obtain when the cued
target sentence word order does not allow the participant a free
choice of grammatical structure (such as in cued Subject-Verb
inversion target responses in Dutch). However, allowing the
participant a choice between two alternative and equivalent word
orders (such as in the Dutch perfect tense in which auxiliary
verb -past participle order is free) does seem to result in a VOT
decrease, indicating that syntactic priming is, as are not many
other facts of life, just a question of choice.
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