Event Structures Drive Semantic Structural Priming, Not Thematic Roles: Evidence From Idioms and Light Verbs

Abstract

What are the semantic representations that underlie language production? We use structural priming to distinguish between two competing theories. Thematic roles define semantic structure in terms of atomic units that specify event participants and are ordered with respect to each other through a hierarchy of roles. Event structures instead instantiate semantic structure as embedded sub‐predicates that impose an order on verbal arguments based on their relative positioning in these embeddings. Across two experiments, we found that priming for datives depended on the degree of overlap in event structures. Specifically, while all dative structures showed priming, due to common syntax, there was a boost for compositional datives priming other compositional datives. Here, the two syntactic forms have distinct event structures. In contrast, there was no boost in priming for dative light verbs, where the two forms map onto a single event representation. On the thematic roles hypothesis, we would have expected a similar degree of priming for the two cases. Thus, our results support event structural approaches to semantic representation and not thematic roles.

The role of explicit memory in syntactic persistence: Effects of lexical cueing and load on sentence memory and sentence production

“…Bock [ 9 ] first discovered structural priming in an experimental setting: In a series of tasks disguised as a recognition memory test, speakers were more likely to choose a passive structure (e.g., The church is being struck by lightning ) over an active structure (e.g., The lightning is striking the church ) to describe a picture after they heard a passive sentence. Structural priming is often considered as an effect that entails the autonomous repetition of syntactic structures independent of processing at other linguistic levels such as lexical access ([ 9 , 15 , 16 ], but see [ 17 ]). Nevertheless, it was also found that lexical overlap considerably enhances the magnitude of structural priming (i.e., lexical boost).…”

Roles for Event Representations in Sensorimotor Experience, Memory Formation, and Language Processing

“…Event representations from this perspective are representations of the meanings of certain types of sentence—namely, sentences that are aspectually “events” (Vendler, 1967). Linguistic argumentation and psycholinguistic experiments provide some very subtle ways of studying the semantic representations of sentences, and so offer an alternative, highly informative, empirical window onto event representations (see e.g., Levin, 2015; Ziegler, Snedeker, & Wittenberg, 2018). It is parsimonious to posit that the event representations constructed during perceptual processing, that mediate access to LTM, are the same as those studied by linguists that encode the meaning of sentences reporting events.…”

Bi-Directional Evidence Linking Sentence Production and Comprehension: A Cross-Modality Structural Priming Study

“…Another final point to note is that many studies of structural priming have focused on the effect of distance, or lag, between prime and target sentences, particularly in the debate between models of structural priming (i.e., the implicit learning account, Chang et al, 2006 and the residual activation account, Pickering and Branigan, 1998). Though the materials of the current study included prime-target pairs separated by 0, 1, or 2 filler sentences, the task was not explicitly designed to test this lag effect.…”