On the parity of structural persistence in language production and comprehension

Abstract

Structural priming creates structural persistence. That is, differences in experience with syntax can change subsequent language performance, and the changes can be observed in both language production and comprehension. However, the effects in comprehension and production appear to differ. In comprehension, persistence is typically found when the verbs are the same in primes and targets; in production, persistence occurs without verb overlap. The contrast suggests a theoretically important hypothesis: parsing in comprehension is lexically driven while formulation in production is structurally driven. A major weakness in this hypothesis about comprehension-production differences is that its empirical motivation rests on the outcomes of experiments in which the priming manipulations differ, the primed sentence structures differ, and the measures of priming differ. To sharpen the comparison, we examined structural persistence with and without verb overlap in both reading comprehension and spoken production, using the same prime presentation procedure, the same syntactic structures, the same sentences, and the same participants. These methods yielded abstract sructural persistence in comprehension as well as production. A measure of the strength of persistence revealed significant effects of priming and verb overlap without significant comprehension—production differences. This argues for uniformity in the structural mechanisms of language processing.

Shared abstract representation of linguistic structure in bilingual sentence comprehension

“…This is the first demonstration of abstract structural crosslinguistic priming in comprehension. The results are consistent with recent demonstrations of abstract comprehension priming in monolingual samples (Pickering et al, 2013;Segaert et al, 2013;Tooley & Bock, 2014). They suggest that bilingual speakers make use of common abstract grammatical representations in comprehension, as has been shown for production.…”

“…Just as recent studies suggest that differences in priming between production and comprehension in monolingual populations might be more apparent than real (Segaert et al, 2013;Tooley & Bock, 2014), we suggest crosslinguistic priming in comprehension is also likely to be abstract. The current study considered this possibility by investigating priming of subject and object relative clauses (RCs) in English-German bilinguals.…”

Aging and syntactic representations: Evidence of preserved syntactic priming and lexical boost.

“…Syntactic priming is highly pervasive across a variety of syntactic forms in young adults' production (see Mahowald, James, Futrell, & Gibson, 2016, for a meta-analytical review) and comprehension (see Tooley & Traxler, 2010, for a review), and studies have ruled out explanations for priming based on repetition of lexical content (Bock, 1989) or repetition of other levels of structure, such as prosody (Bock & Loebell, 1990). Furthermore, priming occurs across different language modalities, such as from comprehension to production, and vice versa (Bock, Dell, Chang, & Onishi, 2007;Branigan, Pickering, & Cleland, 2000;Tooley & Bock, 2014). This suggests that syntactic priming recruits modality-independent and lexically-independent (i.e., abstract) representations of syntactic structures; thus, the presence of priming effects is informative of a speaker's syntactic representations.…”

The cognitive plausibility of statistical classification models: Comparing textual and behavioral evidence

“…One set of data is said to reflect production and the other comprehension. The picture is far from clear-cut: written language is hardly pure production and no comprehension (we often re-read and edit a text), same as choosing between alternatives is hardly all comprehension and no production (see Tooley & Bock [2014] and references there for a recent overview on the relationship between language comprehension and language production). Arppe & Abdulrahim (2013) have even claimed that making a selection can be seen as a form of production that is comparable to the process underlying the generation of corpus data.…”