How abstract is syntax? Evidence from structural priming

Abstract

In 1990, Bock and Loebell found that passives (e.g., The 747 was radioed by the airport's control tower) can be primed by intransitive locatives (e.g., The 747 was landing by the airport's control tower). This finding is often taken as strong evidence that structural priming occurs on the basis of a syntactic phrase structure that abstracts across lexical content, including prepositions, and is uninfluenced by the semantic roles of the arguments. However, all of the intransitive locative primes in Bock and Loebell contained the preposition by (by-locatives), just like the passive targets. Therefore, the locative-to-passive priming may have been due to the adjunct headed by by, rather than being a result of purely abstract syntax. The present experiment investigates this possibility. We find that passives and intransitive by-locatives are equivalent primes, but intransitive locatives with other prepositions (e.g., The 747 has landed near the airport control tower) do not prime passives. We conclude that a shared abstract, content-less tree structure is not sufficient for passive priming to occur. We then review the prior results that have been offered in favor of abstract tree priming, and note the range of evidence can be considerably narrowed-and possibly eliminated-once effects of animacy, semantic event structure, shared morphology, information structure, and rhythm are taken into account.

Contrasting mechanistic accounts of the lexical boost

“…These results suggest that the lexical boost does not primarily arise from shallow explicit memory cues relating to the specific wording of the prime sentence. Nor can the lexical boost in this experiment be attributed to repetition of the word by, or the byphrase, as has been found for abstract priming effects in production (Ziegler et al, 2019). It is worth noting, however, that the current results are not inconsistent with the Ziegler et al (2019) findings.…”

“…Nor can the lexical boost in this experiment be attributed to repetition of the word by, or the byphrase, as has been found for abstract priming effects in production (Ziegler et al, 2019). It is worth noting, however, that the current results are not inconsistent with the Ziegler et al (2019) findings. In that study, structural priming arose from the repetition of the word by when it acted as the head of adjunct in both structures.…”

“…The next important question to address is whether a shortlived mechanism that relies on shallow, explicit memory for the wording of the prime is sufficient to account for the observed lexical boost. Past evidence of good enough parsing for comprehension of complex syntactic structures (e.g., Ferreira et al, 2002) as well as recent evidence that repetition of a function word can elicit syntactic priming in production (Ziegler et al, 2019) makes this a plausible explanation that deserves attention. Experiment 2 was designed to test whether, in the absence of structural overlap, surface-level lexical repetition following a repeated verb is sufficient to produce a lexical boost.…”

“…In such cases, readers have been shown to endorse propositional interpretations of word strings in sentences that are inconsistent with the global structure/interpretation of that sentence. Additionally, classic findings of locatives priming passive sentences (e.g., Bock & Loebell, 1990) regardless of function word overlap, have been called into question by more recent findings that these effects only emerge when the function word by is present in the locative prime (Ziegler, Bencini, Goldberg, & Snedeker, 2019). In light of such findings, it is prudent to test the possibility that shallow explicit memory for prime wording drives the lexical boost.…”

MVPA does not reveal neural representations of hierarchical linguistic structure in MEG

“…More recent investigations indicate, however, that event structure (i.e. thematic roles) as well as lexical information can to a large degree account for many priming results and hence priming solely on the structural level has not been definitively proven yet (Ziegler et al [2019]). Other confounding factors that can evoke priming and are often contrasted along side syntactic structures are information structure, syntax-animacy mapping and rhythmic priming.…”