Do you what I say? People reconstruct the syntax of anomalous utterances

Abstract

We frequently experience and successfully process anomalous utterances. Here we examine whether people do this by ‘correcting’ syntactic anomalies to yield well-formed representations. In two structural priming experiments, participants’ syntactic choices in picture description were influenced as strongly by previously comprehended anomalous (missing-verb) prime sentences as by well-formed prime sentences. Our results suggest that comprehenders can reconstruct the constituent structure of anomalous utterances – even when such utterances lack a major structural component such as the verb. These results also imply that structural alignment in dialogue is unaffected if one interlocutor produces anomalous utterances.

Priming is swell, but it's far from simple

“…For example, structural priming can occur from isolated verbs: Verbs that occur only, or mostly, in one construction can prime that construction (Melinger & Dobel 2005). However, counterintuitively, structural priming also can occur from sentences with missing verbs (e.g., The waitress the book to the monk), and such priming has a similar magnitude to priming from well-formed primes (e.g., The waitress gives the book to the monk; Ivanova et al 2017). These data suggest that comprehenders can reconstruct missing verb categories as well as missing post-verbal syntactic constituents, and these reconstructed representations give rise to priming effects.…”

The Relationship between Syntactic Satiation and Syntactic Priming: A First Look

“…Given that ungrammatical structures have no licit representation… there should be no syntactic priming effect for ungrammatical structures” ( Sprouse, 2007 , p. 128). In contrast, other work ( Kaschak and Glenberg, 2004 ; Luka and Barsalou, 2005 ; Ivanova et al, 2012a , b , 2017 ; etc.) has suggested that priming need not be limited to fully grammatical sentences.…”

“…This may be partly due to differences in their methodological traditions. Priming, for instance, has been investigated almost exclusively with grammatical sentences (but see Kaschak and Glenberg, 2004 ; Ivanova et al, 2012a , b , 2017 ; etc. ), often by means of production-oriented methods where the dependent variable is the proportion of trials on which a participant produces the primed structure.…”

“…At the lexical level, a series of experiments by Ivanova et al (2012a , b , 2017) investigated if and how comprehenders build syntactic representations for anomalous ditransitive sentences (ex. 5a–b), when the verb is (a) a nonce word void of any semantic meaning, (b) a grammatically unacceptable verb, or (c) missing altogether.…”

“…Crucially, Ivanova et al (2012a , 2017) used the presence/absence of syntactic priming effects (assessed via the proportion of participant-produced sentences matching the structure of the prime) to diagnose whether comprehenders had built syntactic representations for anomalous sentences. 4 They found evidence of structural priming – and thus the presence of abstract syntactic structure – with nonce-verb primes (5a), with illicit verb primes (5b) and even when the prime contained no verb (5c).…”