Comprehension priming as rational expectation for repetition: Evidence from syntactic processing

Abstract

Why do comprehenders process repeated stimuli more rapidly than novel stimuli? We consider an adaptive explanation for why such facilitation may be beneficial: priming is a consequence of expectation for repetition due to rational adaptation to the environment. If occurrences of a stimulus cluster in time, given one occurrence it is rational to expect a second occurrence closely following. Leveraging such knowledge may be particularly useful in online processing of language, where pervasive clustering may help comprehenders negotiate the considerable challenge of continual expectation update at multiple levels of linguistic structure and environmental variability. We test this account in the domain of structural priming in syntax, making use of the sentential complement-direct object (SC-DO) ambiguity. We first show that sentences containing SC continuations cluster in natural language, motivating an expectation for repetition of this structure. Second, we show that comprehenders are indeed sensitive to the syntactic clustering properties of their current environment. In a series of between-groups self-paced reading studies, we find that participants who are exposed to clusters of SC sentences subsequently process repetitions of SC structure more rapidly than participants who are exposed to the same number of SCs spaced in time, and attribute the difference to the learned degree of expectation for repetition. We model this behavior through Bayesian belief update, showing that (the optimal degree of) sensitivity to clustering properties of syntactic structures is indeed learnable through experience. Comprehension priming effects are thus consistent with rational expectation for repetition based on adaptation to the linguistic environment.

Self‐Priming in Production: Evidence for a Hybrid Model of Syntactic Priming

“…In all three experiments, we find that speakers are more likely to produce a construction if they have just recently produced that construction themselves. The evidence for self-priming presented here is consistent with a number of corpus studies with similar findings (e.g., Gries, 2005;Jaeger & Snider, 2013;Mysl ın & Levy, 2016;Reitter et al, 2011). The current study is novel in that we see evidence for self-priming while ruling out alternative explanations.…”

“…In addition to this, we hope to determine whether the syntactic choices of one production trial directly influence the syntactic choices of subsequent trials. While a number of studies have shown that speakers tend to repeat themselves, potentially due to self‐priming or residual activation (e.g., Myslín & Levy, ; Reitter & Moore, ), these effects could result from confounds such as discourse factors favoring one structure over another, or a speaker's baseline preference for a construction, as we mention above. In order to determine whether there are dependencies between trials in the likelihood of selecting one structure over another, we apply a novel mixed effects autocorrelation analysis with a multinomial outcome to the current data set.…”

A Mechanistic Framework for Explaining Audience Design in Language Production

“…Chang, Dell, and Bock (2006) explain syntactic repetition as a kind of learning effect -that the original experience of hearing a type of event meaning expressed with a particular structure strengthens the connection between that event meaning and that Page 18 structure, leading speakers to be more likely to use that structure again in the future. Jaeger and Snider (2013) attribute syntactic priming to learning with the goal to reduce "joint effort" of interlocutors and to "minimize the expected future prediction error" (for related discussion of the effects of repetition on prediction errors experienced during comprehension, see Fine & Jaeger, 2013Fine et al, 2013;Myslin & Levy, 2016).…”

I know what you're probably going to say: Listener adaptation to variable use of uncertainty expressions

“…As a starting point for this investigation, we consider adaptation in other linguistic domains. Apart from the work on quantifiers, linguistic adaptation has been observed in phonetics (Babel, 2012;Clayards, Tanenhaus, Aslin, & Jacobs, 2008;Goldinger, 1998;Kleinschmidt & Jaeger, 2015;Kraljic & Samuel, 2005Norris et al, 2003), syntax (Fine & Jaeger, 2016;Fine, Jaeger, Farmer, & Qian, 2013;Kamide, 2012;Kroczek & Gunter, 2017;Myslín & Levy, 2016), 1 intonation and prosody (Kurumada, Brown, & Tanenhaus, 2012;Roettger & Franke, 2019), and with phenomena such as referring expressions (Brennan & Clark, 1996;Brennan & Hanna, 2009;Brown-Schmidt, 2009;H. H. Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986;Hawkins, Frank, & Goodman, 2017;Horton & Gerrig, 2005;Metzing & Brennan, 2003), contrastive inferences (Grodner & Sedivy, 2011;Pogue, Kurumada, & Tanenhaus, 2016), and lexical associations (Delaney-Busch, Morgan, Lau, & Kuperberg, 2019).…”