Priming semantic structure in Brazilian Portuguese

Ziegler, Jayden; Morato, Rodrigo Altair; Snedeker, Jesse

doi:10.1007/s41809-019-00022-8

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 60 publications

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“…Thus, while humans are able to exhibit crosslingual structural priming effects between languages when the equivalent structures do not share the same word orders (Muylle et al, 2020;Ziegler et al, 2019;Hsieh, 2017;Chen et al, 2013), this may not hold for contemporary language models. Specifically, given the aforementioned limitations of contemporary language models, it would be unsurprising that structural priming effects are weaker for morphologically-rich target languages with relatively free word order such as Polish and Greek.…”

Section: Null Effects and Asymmetriesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Structural Priming Demonstrates Abstract Grammatical Representations in Multilingual Language Models

Michaelov,

Arnett,

Chang

et al. 2023

Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

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grammatical knowledge-of parts of speech and grammatical patterns-is key to the capacity for linguistic generalization in humans. But how abstract is grammatical knowledge in large language models? In the human literature, compelling evidence for grammatical abstraction comes from structural priming. A sentence that shares the same grammatical structure as a preceding sentence is processed and produced more readily. Because confounds exist when using stimuli in a single language, evidence of abstraction is even more compelling from crosslingual structural priming, where use of a syntactic structure in one language primes an analogous structure in another language. We measure crosslingual structural priming in large language models, comparing model behavior to human experimental results from eight crosslingual experiments covering six languages, and four monolingual structural priming experiments in three non-English languages. We find evidence for abstract monolingual and crosslingual grammatical representations in the models that function similarly to those found in humans. These results demonstrate that grammatical representations in multilingual language models are not only similar across languages, but they can causally influence text produced in different languages.

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Section: Null Effects and Asymmetriesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Structural Priming Demonstrates Abstract Grammatical Representations in Multilingual Language Models

Michaelov,

Arnett,

Chang

et al. 2023

Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

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Special issue on Structural Priming in Less-Studied Languages and Dialects: Introduction

Pickering

Branigan

2019

J Cult Cogn Sci

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We provide a brief introduction to the special issue of the Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science entitled Structural Priming in Less-Studied Languages and Dialects. Structural priming is the tendency for people to use linguistic structures that they have recently encountered. It has been extensively investigated in English and a few related languages, but there has been very little work on the vast majority of languages around the world. We are pleased to publish six papers concerned with Turkish, Norwegian, Irish, Italian, and two varieties of Portuguese. They are informative about many issues in linguistic representation and processing and help diversify psycholinguistics and the cognitive sciences more generally.

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How abstract is syntax? Evidence from structural priming

et al. 2019

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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.

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Priming semantic structure in Brazilian Portuguese

Cited by 3 publications

References 60 publications

Structural Priming Demonstrates Abstract Grammatical Representations in Multilingual Language Models

Structural Priming Demonstrates Abstract Grammatical Representations in Multilingual Language Models

Special issue on Structural Priming in Less-Studied Languages and Dialects: Introduction

How abstract is syntax? Evidence from structural priming

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