An investigation into the lexical boost with nonhead nouns

Abstract

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).

Syntactic Representations Are Both Abstract and Semantically Constrained: Evidence From Children’s and Adults’ Comprehension and Production/Priming of the English Passive

“…As we noted in the Introduction, the present studies do not allow us to differentiate between a view under which a semantic construction prototype is actually stored in memory (e.g., Abbot‐Smith & Tomasello, 2006) and a view under which it is merely emergent across stored exemplars of the construction (e.g., Ambridge, 2019). Future studies may be able to differentiate between these possibilities by manipulating lexical overlap: If participants show an advantage (whether in comprehension or production) for patterns of verbs and arguments that have occurred frequently in the input, or have been recently presented during priming (e.g., He was killed by… ), this would appear to constitute evidence that exemplars are retained with considerable lexical detail (though the jury is still out with regard to exactly when such lexical boosts occur, and exactly what they mean; e.g., Carminati, van Gompel, & Wakeford, 2019; Scheepers, Raffray, & Myachykov, 2017).…”

Do particle verbs share a representation with their root verbs? Evidence from structural priming

“…Many studies have shown a robust effect of structural priming in language comprehension (Arai et al, 2007;Branigan et al, 2005;Thothathiri & Snedeker, 2008) and production (Bock, 1986a(Bock, , 1986bBock & Loebell, 1990;Hartsuiker et al, 2008;Pickering & Branigan, 1998). Importantly, structural priming is even stronger if the prime and target have the same verb; this is called the lexical boost effect (see Bernolet et al, 2014;Carminati et al, 2019;Hartsuiker et al, 2008;Rowland et al, 2012;Scheepers et al, 2017). According to Pickering and Branigan's (1998) account of lexical-syntactic representations, this lexical boost effect is restricted to the repetition of the syntactically licensing head (e.g., the lemma node of the verb "geven" in Figure 1).…”

“…Thus, when the same verb is used again in the target sentence, more activation than usual will flow to the combinatorial node that was used in the prime. There should not be a boost from the repetition of other arguments (e.g., agent, recipient, and theme, Carminati et al, 2019; but see Scheepers et al, 2017) as these arguments are not directly connected to the combinatorial node. Additionally, the priming effect can also be boosted by semantic or phonological overlap between prime and target, but these boosts are much weaker than that of verb repetition (Bock, 1986a(Bock, , 1987Cleland & Pickering, 2003;Santesteban et al, 2010).…”

Do particle verbs share a representation with their root verbs? Evidence from structural priming

“…Many studies have shown a robust effect of structural priming in language comprehension (Arai et al, 2007;Branigan et al, 2005;Thothathiri & Snedeker, 2008) and production (Bock, 1986a(Bock, , 1986bBock & Loebell, 1990;Hartsuiker et al, 2008;Pickering & Branigan, 1998). Importantly, structural priming is even stronger if the prime and target have the same verb; this is called the lexical boost effect (see Bernolet et al, 2014;Carminati et al, 2019;Hartsuiker et al, 2008;Rowland et al, 2012;Scheepers et al, 2017). According to Pickering and Branigan's (1998) account of lexical-syntactic representations, this lexical boost effect is restricted to the repetition of the syntactic licensing head (e.g., the lemma node of the verb "geven" in Figure 1).…”

“…According to Pickering and Branigan's (1998) account of lexical-syntactic representations, this lexical boost effect is restricted to the repetition of the syntactic licensing head (e.g., the lemma node of the verb "geven" in Figure 1). There should not be a boost from the repetition of other arguments (e.g., agent, recipient, and theme, Carminati et al, 2019). Additionally, the priming effect can also be boosted by semantic or phonological overlap between prime and target, but this boost is much weaker than that of verb repetition (Bock, 1986a(Bock, , 1987Cleland & Pickering, 2003;Santesteban et al, 2010).…”