Determiner Primes as Facilitators of Lexical Retrieval in English

Abstract

Gender priming studies have demonstrated facilitation of noun production following pre-activation of a target noun's grammatical gender. Findings provide support for models in which syntactic information relating to words is stored within the lexicon and activated during lexical retrieval. Priming effects are observed in the context of determiner plus noun phrase production. Few studies demonstrate gender priming effects in bare noun production (i.e., nouns in isolation). We investigated the effects of English determiner primes on bare mass and count noun production. In two experiments, participants named pictures after exposure to primes involving congruent, incongruent and neutral determiners. Facilitation of noun production by congruent and neutral determiner primes was found in both experiments. The results suggest that noun phrase syntax is activated in lexical retrieval, even when not explicitly required for production. Post hoc analysis of the relative frequency of congruent and incongruent prime-target pairs provides support for a frequency-based interpretation of the data.

Activation of syntax in lexical production in healthy speakers and in aphasia

“…Cubelli et al (2005) found gender interference for bare nouns in Italian, Akhutina et al (2001) found gender priming effects in Russian, and Paolieri et al (2011) found gender interference in naming bare nouns in Italian. Finally, in English, Gregory et al (2012) primed production of mass and count nouns with congruent determiners. So, across a range of languages, there is evidence of activation of syntactic information, even when this is not explicitly required for the production task, lending support to the claim that syntax is represented lexically.…”

“…Count nouns such as cat frequently occur with determiners such as 'a', whereas mass nouns such as milk frequently occur with determiners such as 'some'. A few studies have capitalized upon this difference to investigate noun syntax in English (Gregory et al, 2012;Herbert and Best, 2005;Herbert and Best, 2010;Vigliocco et al, 1999).…”