The “sense boost” to dative priming: Evidence for sense-specific verb-structure links

Bernolet, Sarah; Colleman, Timothy; Hartsuiker, Robert J.

doi:10.1016/j.jml.2014.06.006

Cited by 17 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…In sum, the full range of data presented here and in Bernolet et al. () can be explained either by the event structures hypothesis alone or by a combination of the event structures hypothesis and the verb sense hypothesis , but it cannot be accounted for by the verb sense hypothesis alone.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 52%

Event Structures Drive Semantic Structural Priming, Not Thematic Roles: Evidence From Idioms and Light Verbs

2018

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What are the semantic representations that underlie language production? We use structural priming to distinguish between two competing theories. Thematic roles define semantic structure in terms of atomic units that specify event participants and are ordered with respect to each other through a hierarchy of roles. Event structures instead instantiate semantic structure as embedded sub‐predicates that impose an order on verbal arguments based on their relative positioning in these embeddings. Across two experiments, we found that priming for datives depended on the degree of overlap in event structures. Specifically, while all dative structures showed priming, due to common syntax, there was a boost for compositional datives priming other compositional datives. Here, the two syntactic forms have distinct event structures. In contrast, there was no boost in priming for dative light verbs, where the two forms map onto a single event representation. On the thematic roles hypothesis, we would have expected a similar degree of priming for the two cases. Thus, our results support event structural approaches to semantic representation and not thematic roles.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 52%

Event Structures Drive Semantic Structural Priming, Not Thematic Roles: Evidence From Idioms and Light Verbs

2018

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“…We again have high power to detect the critical interaction (97.6% for N=64, withinsubjects). This experiment closely resembles a related study by Bernolet et al (2014), which construes the difference as priming between polysemous verbs that share the same sense (either both concrete or both abstract) vs. priming between polysemous verbs with different senses (one concrete and one abstract). We will return to this point in the General Discussion.…”

Section: Current Studysupporting

confidence: 61%

“…A growing body of evidence suggests that priming is cumulative, possibly even additive, such that the more features that align from prime to target, the greater the priming effect (e.g., Bernolet, Colleman, & Hartsuiker, 2014;Bernolet et al, 2009;Cai et al, 2012;Cleland & Pickering, 2003;Gámez & Vasilyeva, 2015;Griffin & Weinstein-Tull, 2003;Hartsuiker & Kolk, 1998-a;Pickering & Branigan, 1998;Potter & Lombardi, 1998;Scheepers et al, 2017;Vernice et al, 2012;; for further discussion, see . This claim does not apply to aspects of structure that do not participate in priming (e.g., verb morphology, metrical structure, overall or detailed syntactic structure;…”

Section: Predictionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Event structures drive semantic structural priming, not thematic roles: Evidence from idioms and light verbs

Ziegler¹,

Snedeker²,

Wittenberg³

2018

Preprint

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What are the semantic representations that underlie language production? We use structural priming to distinguish between two competing theories. Thematic roles define semantic structure in terms of atomic units that specify event participants and are ordered with respect to each other through a hierarchy of roles. Event structures instead instantiate semantic structure as embedded sub-predicates that impose an order on verbal arguments based on their relative positioning in these embeddings. Across two experiments, we found that priming for datives depended on the degree of overlap in event structures. Specifically, while all dative structures showed priming, due to common syntax, there was a boost for compositional datives priming other compositional datives. Here the two syntactic forms have distinct event structures. In contrast, there was no boost in priming for dative light verbs, where the two forms map onto a single event representation. On the thematic roles hypothesis, we would have expected a similar degree of priming for the two cases. Thus, our results support event structural approaches to semantic representation and not thematic roles.

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“…On the basis of previous research, we can suggest two possible explanations for this interaction. First, it might reflect a semantic boost to syntactic priming of the sort reported by Cleland & Pickering (2003), who found that syntactic priming for noun phrase structure was enhanced when the prime and target involved semantically related nouns than when they did not (see also Bernolet, Colleman, & Hartsuiker, 2014).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The independence of syntactic processing in Mandarin: Evidence from structural priming

Huang

Pickering

Yang

et al. 2016

Journal of Memory and Language

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Although it is generally accepted that syntactic information is processed independently of semantic information in languages such as English, there is less agreement about whether the same is true in languages such as Mandarin that have fewer reliable cues to syntactic structure. We report five experiments that used a structural priming paradigm to investigate the independence of syntactic processing in Mandarin. In a recognition memory task, Mandarin native speakers described ditransitive events after repeating prime sentences with a double object (DO) or prepositional object (PO) structure. Participants tended to repeat syntactic structure across prime and target sentences. Critically, this tendency occurred whether or not semantic features (animacy of the recipient) were also repeated across sentences, both when the verb was repeated and when it was not. We conclude that Mandarin speakers compute independent syntactic representations during language processing.

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The “sense boost” to dative priming: Evidence for sense-specific verb-structure links

Cited by 17 publications

References 42 publications

Event Structures Drive Semantic Structural Priming, Not Thematic Roles: Evidence From Idioms and Light Verbs

Event Structures Drive Semantic Structural Priming, Not Thematic Roles: Evidence From Idioms and Light Verbs

Event structures drive semantic structural priming, not thematic roles: Evidence from idioms and light verbs

The independence of syntactic processing in Mandarin: Evidence from structural priming

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