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

Abstract

Many languages have particle verbs like meegeven in Dutch, in which a particle ("mee", with) sometimes appears independently from the root verb ("geven", give). To investigate whether particle verbs and their root verbs share a lexical-syntactic (lemma) representation, we tested whether structural priming (the tendency for speakers to repeat sentence structure) is boosted by lexical overlap between prime and target verbs. Priming was larger with repetition of the identical verb than with root-only repetition and larger with particle-only repetition than without lexical repetition. These findings support a dual-lemma representation for particle verbs: one lemma represents the verb-particle combination (separately from the root), another lemma represents the particle (shared with other particle verbs). Finally, priming was larger from root to particle verb than between two different particle verbs with identical roots, suggesting that particle-verb lemmas are connected to their root-verb lemmas but not to each other.

Does working memory modulate cross-linguistic structural priming?

“…For the matching task following the prime sentences, half of the prime pictures matched with the corresponding prime sentences and the other half did not (with either a different agent, recipient, or theme, see Cai et al, 2011a;Chen & Hartsuiker, 2021;Huang et al, 2019). We constructed 96 filler items including 24 DO filler sentences, 21 intranstive sentences, and 51transitive sentences.…”

“…Before the formal experiment, participants were required to familiarize the names of all experimental entities. In the experiment, we used the comprehension-to-production structural priming paradigm (Cai et al, 2011;Chen & Hartsuiker, 2021;Huang et al, 2019) and an additional working memory task between the prime and target (Chen et al, 2023a;Coumel et al, 2023). In each experimental trial, participants heard a prime sentence in either…”

“…Structural priming occurs in many languages (e.g., English: Bock, 1986;Pickering & Branigan, 1998;Chinese: Cai et al, 2011;Chen et al, 2020;Dutch: Bernolet & Hartsuiker, 2010;Chen & Hartsuiker, 2021;German: Chang et al, 2015;Köhne et al, 2014;Spanish: Gá mez & Shimpi, 2016). Importantly, many studies also found structural priming between languages for bilinguals or multilinguals.…”

Priming the Arabic dative: Evidence for syntactic abstractness and implicit learning

“…Cumulative priming effects describe when the speaker produces the target structure following repeated exposure to that structure in the experiment. Previous works have the reported the cumulativity of priming effects; an incremental increase in the magnitude of priming effects with increasing exposure to the prime structure (Hartsuiker et al, 2008;Jaeger and Snider, 2008;Kaschak et al, 2011a;Ruf, 2011;Bernolet et al, 2016;Branigan and Messenger, 2016;Kaan and Chun, 2017;Kutta et al, 2017;Chen and Hartsuiker, 2021;Messenger, 2021;Coumel et al, 2022).…”

“…However, most of the established properties of syntactic priming are based on evidence from studies conducted on a small group of typologically similar languages such as Dutch (Bernolet and Hartsuiker, 2010;Segaert et al, 2013;Bernolet et al, 2014Bernolet et al, , 2016Zhang et al, 2020Zhang et al, , 2022Chen and Hartsuiker, 2021), German Pechmann, 2013, 2014;Köhne et al, 2014), as well as English (Savage et al, 2006;Bock et al, 2007;Santesteban et al, 2010;Kaschak et al, 2011a;Kidd, 2012;Rowland et al, 2012;Bunger et al, 2013;Jaeger and Snider, 2013;Tooley and Bock, 2014;Branigan and McLean, 2016;Branigan and Messenger, 2016;Hardy et al, 2017Hardy et al, , 2020Carminati et al, 2019;Litcofsky and van Hell, 2019;Bidgood et al, 2020;Chia et al, 2020;Messenger, 2021;Heyselaar and Segaert, 2022;van Gompel et al, 2022). Interestingly, sometimes findings differ even between closely related languages.…”