Syntactic entrainment: The repetition of syntactic structures in event descriptions

Gruberg, Nicholas; Ostrand, Rachel; Momma, Shota; Ferreira, Victor S.

doi:10.1016/j.jml.2019.04.005

Cited by 14 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…Some researchers have found that certain non-linguistic perception or action tasks themselves prime certain sentence structures in language production (Kaiser, 2012;Scheepers and Sturt, 2014;Van de Cavey and Hartsuiker, 2016). One interpretation of these data is that they reflect domain general sequencing mechanisms (Van de Cavey and Hartsuiker, 2016), but an alternative is that these effects reflect a domaingeneral representation of events, so that priming of certain event representations have potential to affect both action planning and verbal descriptions of events (Kaiser, 2012; see also Ziegler et al, 2018;Gruberg et al, 2019). Another possibility is that shared planning is driven by shared (external) organization.…”

Section: Interactions Between Action and Language Tasksmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is Language Production Planning Emergent From Action Planning? A Preliminary Investigation

et al. 2020

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The nature of syntactic planning for language production may reflect language-specific processes, but an alternative is that syntactic planning is an example of more domaingeneral action planning processes. If so, language and non-linguistic action planning should have identifiable commonalities, consistent with an underlying shared system. Action and language research have had little contact, however, and such comparisons are therefore lacking. Here, we address this gap by taking advantage of a striking similarity between two phenomena in language and action production. One is known as syntactic priming-the tendency to re-use a recently produced sentence structureand the second is hysteresis-the tendency to re-use a previously executed abstract action plan, such as a limb movement. We examined syntactic priming/hysteresis in parallel language and action tasks intermixed in a single experimental session. Our goals were to establish the feasibility of investigating language and action planning within the same participants and to inform debates on the language-specific vs. domain-general nature of planning systems. In both action and language tasks, target trials afforded two alternative orders of subcomponents in the participant's response: in the language task, a picture could be described with two different word orders, and in the action task, locations on a touch screen could be touched in two different orders. Prime trials preceding the target trial promoted one of two plans in the respective domain. Manipulations yielded higher rates of primed behavior in both tasks. In an exploratory cross-domain analysis, there was some evidence for stronger priming effects in some combinations of action and language priming conditions than others. These results establish a method for investigating the degree to which language planning is part of a domain-general action planning system.

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Section: Interactions Between Action and Language Tasksmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is Language Production Planning Emergent From Action Planning? A Preliminary Investigation

et al. 2020

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“…We selected the syntactic and acoustic-phonetic levels to assess alignment within the same interaction because it seemed possible that they could show differing patterns. On the one hand, prior work has shown that speakers do not align their syntax in a partner-specific manner ( Ostrand & Ferreira, 2019 ), but do engage in other forms of syntactic alignment by modulating their syntax to match other types of linguistic context (e.g., Branigan et al, 2000 ; Gruberg, Ostrand, Momma, & Ferreira, 2019 ; Kaschak, 2007 ). On the other hand, many studies (as noted above) have investigated alignment on various phonetic features, including in spontaneous speech tasks, finding positive evidence of alignment.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

It’s alignment all the way down, but not all the way up: Speakers align on some features but not others within a dialogue

Ostrand

Chodroff

2021

Journal of Phonetics

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During conversation, speakers modulate characteristics of their production to match their interlocutors’ characteristics. This behavior is known as alignment . Speakers align at many linguistic levels, including the syntactic, lexical, and phonetic levels. As a result, alignment is often treated as a unitary phenomenon, in which evidence of alignment on one feature is cast as alignment of the entire linguistic level. This experiment investigates whether alignment can occur at some levels but not others, and on some features but not others, within a given dialogue. Participants interacted with two experimenters with highly contrasting acoustic-phonetic and syntactic profiles. The experimenters each described sets of pictures using a consistent acoustic-phonetic and syntactic profile; the participants then described new pictures to each experimenter individually. Alignment was measured as the degree to which subjects matched their current listener’s speech (vs. their non-listener’s) on each of several individual acoustic-phonetic and syntactic features. Additionally, a holistic measure of phonetic alignment was assessed using 323 acoustic-phonetic features analyzed jointly in a machine learning classifier. Although participants did not align on several individual spectral-phonetic or syntactic features, they did align on individual temporal-phonetic features and as measured by the holistic acoustic-phonetic profile. Thus, alignment can simultaneously occur at some levels but not others within a given dialogue, and is not a single phenomenon but rather a constellation of loosely-related effects. These findings suggest that the mechanism underlying alignment is not a primitive, automatic priming mechanism but rather guided by communicative or social factors.

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“…This indicates that the phrasal combinatorial nodes of a prime are sufficient to bias future production preferences in speakers, even in the absence of shared lexical-semantic content between prime and target (Bock & Loebell, 1990). However, later studies have shown that structural priming implicates levels of nonsyntactic representations, such as lexical items (e.g., Hartsuiker, Bernolet, Schoonbaert, Speybroeck, & Vanderelst, 2008;Pickering & Branigan, 1998;Scheepers, Raffray, & Myachykov, 2017) and event semantic content (Gruberg, Ostrand, Momma, & Ferreira, 2019;Gruberg, Wardlow, & Ferreira, 2019;Lee, Man, Ferreira, & Gruberg, 2019, for aphasic data).…”

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confidence: 99%

Effects of Verb Overlap on Structural Priming in Dialogue: Implications for Syntactic Learning in Aphasia

Man

Meehan

Martin

et al. 2019

J Speech Lang Hear Res

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Purpose Although there is increasing interest in using structural priming as a means to ameliorate grammatical encoding deficits in persons with aphasia (PWAs), little is known about the precise mechanisms of structural priming that are associated with robust and enduring effects in PWAs. Two dialogue-like comprehension-to-production priming experiments investigated whether lexically independent (abstract structural) priming and/or lexically (verb) specific priming yields immediate and longer, lasting facilitation of syntactic production in PWAs. Method Seventeen PWAs and 20 healthy older adults participated in a collaborative picture-matching task where participant and experimenter took turns describing picture cards using transitive and dative sentences. In Experiment 1, a target was elicited immediately following a prime. In Experiment 2, 2 unrelated utterances intervened between a prime and target, thereby allowing us to examine lasting priming effects. In both experiments, the verb was repeated for half of the prime–target pairs to examine the lexical (verb) boost on priming. Results Healthy older adults demonstrated abstract priming in both transitives and datives not only in the immediate (Experiment 1) but also in the lasting (Experiment 2) priming condition. They also showed significantly enhanced priming by verb overlap (lexical boost) in transitives during immediate priming. PWAs demonstrated abstract priming in transitives in both immediate and lasting priming conditions. However, the magnitude of priming was not enhanced by verb overlap. Conclusions Abstract structural priming, but not lexically specific priming, is associated with reliable and lasting facilitation of message–structure mapping in aphasia. The findings also suggest that implicit syntactic learning via a dialogue-like comprehension-to-production task remains preserved in aphasia.

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Syntactic entrainment: The repetition of syntactic structures in event descriptions

Cited by 14 publications

References 27 publications

Is Language Production Planning Emergent From Action Planning? A Preliminary Investigation

Is Language Production Planning Emergent From Action Planning? A Preliminary Investigation

It’s alignment all the way down, but not all the way up: Speakers align on some features but not others within a dialogue

Effects of Verb Overlap on Structural Priming in Dialogue: Implications for Syntactic Learning in Aphasia

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