No looking back: the effects of visual cues on the lexical boost in structural priming

The head or the verb: Is the lexical boost restricted to the head verb?

“…Carminati et al proposed that the non-head boost, such as found by Scheepers et al, if it exists, may come and go depending on the subtle experimental methods, thereby contrasting it with the verb boost that is stable and reliably found in many experiments. This is supported by recent findings by Van Gompel et al (2022), who found a head verb boost in ditransitive structures regardless of the method, whereas a nonhead boost from the subject noun only occurred when participants could see the prime and target simultaneously, suggesting that it is more strategic in nature and only occurs when participants can visually check the prime when they complete the target. Our current results provide further support that the distinction between head and non-head is critical for the lexical boost.…”

“…The priming effect was also not significant in Corley and Scheepers (2003), who used an online completion method without pictures. Scheepers et al (2017) only found priming when they combined all three experiments in their study and Van Gompel et al (2022) did not find significant abstract priming in their Experiment 1. However, regardless of the reason why the abstract priming effect was only marginally significant, the critical finding from Experiment 4 is that repetition of the head verb did boost priming.…”

Grammatical dependencies shape compositional units in sentence production

“…In contrast, in sentences with object filler-gap dependencies, verbs anchor a complementizer phrase (CP)-sized structural unit, which contains functional structures above VP, including inflectional phrase (IP) heads such as tense/aspect heads. I will present a formal theory that instantiates this claim and presents a simple computational model that derives empirical predictions about structural priming, speakers' tendency to reuse the structures they recently encountered (Bock, 1986;Levelt & Kelter, 1982;Mahowald et al, 2016;Pickering & Ferreira, 2008), and the lexical boost, the increase in the magnitude of structural priming due to the repetition of the head of the primed structure (Carminati et al 2019;Cleland & Pickering 2003;van Gompel et al 2022;Kantola et al 2023;Pickering & Branigan 1998;Segaert et al 2014 among many others). I will then present five structural priming experiments that test the predictions of the model.…”

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

“…This phenomenon is known as syntactic priming or structural priming (Pickering and Ferreira, 2008), and has garnered researchers' attention since Bock's landmark work in the mid-1980s (1986. It has been empirically observed for different syntactic alternations, including the dative alternation "The seller gave the farmer the potatoes vs. the seller gave the potatoes to the farmer" (Rowland et al, 2012;van Gompel et al, 2022), the passive/active alternation "the man is pushing the box vs. the box is being pushed by the man" (Bidgood et al, 2020;Messenger, 2021), the fronted/nonfronted adverbial phrase "In the park, the dog chased the cat vs. the dog chased the cat in the park" (Ruf, 2011;Coumel et al, 2022), and the transitive/intransitive constructions "Lisa dropped the ball to the floor vs. the ball dropped to the floor" (Bidgood et al, 2021). Another type of evidence for syntactic priming comes from the analysis of natural conversational speech Snider, 2008, 2013;Chia et al, 2020).…”

“…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.…”