In five structural-priming experiments, we investigated lexical boost effects in the production of ditransitive sentences. Although the residual activation model of Pickering and Branigan (1998) suggests that a lexical boost should only occur with the repetition of a syntactic licensing head in ditransitive prepositional object (PO)/double object (DO) structures, Scheepers, Raffray, and Myachykov (2017) recently found that it also occurs with the repetition of nouns that are not syntactic heads. We manipulated the repetition of the subject (Experiments 1-3), and the verb phrase (VP) internal arguments (i.e., either theme or recipient, Experiments 4-5) in PO/DO structures. In Experiment 2, the verb was also repeated between prime and target, while in the other experiments it was not. Three different tasks for eliciting the target were employed: picture description via the oral completion of a sentence fragment (Experiments 1-2, and 4), oral completion of a sentence fragment with no visual context (Experiment 3), and oral production of a sentence from a given array of words and no visual context (Experiment 5). Priming occurred in all experiments and was stronger when the verb was repeated (Experiment 2) than when it was not (Experiment 1). However, none of the experiments showed evidence that priming was stronger when either the subject or one of the VP-internal arguments were repeated. These findings support the view that structural information is associated with syntactic heads (i.e., the verb), but not with nonheads such as the subject noun and the VP-internal arguments (Pickering & Branigan, 1998).

Detecting psychological change through mobilizing interactions and changes in extremist linguistic style,

No abstract

No abstract

This chapter describes how the Islamic State (IS) used social media in sometimes innovative, sometimes less novel ways to advance its full-spectrum propaganda. The chapter takes a social psychological perspective to explain how and why the group’s social media strategy was effective, documenting IS’s ability to develop a coherent and cohesive shared social identity and brand through social media (particularly Twitter) interactions. It is argued that while IS responded to technological developments in online and social media to develop a sophisticated media strategy, at the same time, social media played an instrumental role in the development and evolution of IS itself. This chapter also offers an opportunity to critically examine methodological challenges, future research opportunities, and the conceptual implications of studying the activities of IS and other extremist groups online.