An exemplar model should be able to explain all syntactic priming phenomena : a commentary on Ambridge (2020)

The authors argue that Ambridge’s radical exemplar account of language cannot clearly explain all syntactic priming evidence, such as inverse preference effects (greater priming for less frequent structures), and the contrast between short-lived lexical boost and long-lived abstract priming. Moreover, without recourse to a level of abstract syntactic structure, Ambridge’s account cannot explain abstract priming in amnesia patients or cross-linguistic priming. Instead, the authors argue that abstract representations remain the more parsimonious account for the wide variety of syntactic priming phenomena

A paradox of syntactic priming: why response tendencies show priming for passives, and response latencies show priming for actives

Speakers tend to repeat syntactic structures across sentences, a phenomenon called syntactic priming. Although it has been suggested that repeating syntactic structures should result in speeded responses, previous research has focused on effects in response tendencies. We investigated syntactic priming effects simultaneously in response tendencies and response latencies for active and passive transitive sentences in a picture description task. In Experiment 1, there were priming effects in response tendencies for passives and in response latencies for actives. However, when participants' pre-existing preference for actives was altered in Experiment 2, syntactic priming occurred for both actives and passives in response tendencies as well as in response latencies. This is the first investigation of the effects of structure frequency on both response tendencies and latencies in syntactic priming. We discuss the implications of these data for current theories of syntactic processing

A Computational Cognitive Model of Syntactic Priming

The psycholinguistic literature has identified two syntactic adaptation effects in language production: rapidly decaying short-term priming and long-lasting adaptation. To explain both effects, we present an ACT-R model of syntactic priming based on a wide-coverage, lexicalized syntactic theory that explains priming as facilitation of lexical access. In this model, two well-established ACT-R mechanisms, base-level learning and spreading activation, account for long-term adaptation and short-term priming, respectively. Our model simulates incremental language production and in a series of modeling studies we show that it accounts for (a) the inverse frequency interaction; (b) the absence of a decay in long-term priming; and (c) the cumulativity of long-term adaptation. The model also explains the lexical boost effect and the fact that it only applies to short-term priming. We also present corpus data that verifies a prediction of the model, i.e., that the lexical boost affects all lexical material, rather than just heads. Keywords: syntactic priming, adaptation, cognitive architectures, ACT-R, categorial grammar, incrementality

What children learn from adults’ utterances:an ephemeral lexical boost and persistent syntactic priming in adult–child dialogue

We show that children’s syntactic production is immediately affected by individual experiences of structures and verb–structure pairings within a dialogue, but that these effects have different timecourses. In a picture-matching game, three- to four-year-olds were more likely to describe a transitive action using a passive immediately after hearing the experimenter produce a passive than an active (abstract priming), and this tendency was stronger when the verb was repeated (lexical boost). The lexical boost disappeared after two intervening utterances, but the abstract priming effect persisted. This pattern did not differ significantly from control adults. Children also showed a cumulative priming effect. Our results suggest that whereas the same mechanism may underlie children’s immediate syntactic priming and long-term syntactic learning, different mechanisms underlie the lexical boost versus long-term learning of verb–structure links. They also suggest broad continuity of syntactic processing in production between this age group and adults

Bidirectional syntactic priming across cognitive domains: from arithmetic to language and back

Scheepers et al. (2011) showed that the structure of a correctly solved mathematical equation affects how people subsequently complete sentences containing high vs. low relative-clause attachment ambiguities. Here we investigated whether such effects generalise to different structures and tasks, and importantly, whether they also hold in the reverse direction (i.e., from linguistic to mathematical processing). In a questionnaire-based experiment, participants had to solve structurally left- or right-branching equations (e.g., 5 × 2 + 7 versus 5 + 2 × 7) and to provide sensicality ratings for structurally left- or right-branching adjective-noun-noun compounds (e.g., alien monster movie versus lengthy monster movie). In the first version of the experiment, the equations were used as primes and the linguistic expressions as targets (investigating structural priming from maths to language). In the second version, the order was reversed (language-to-maths priming). Both versions of the experiment showed clear structural priming effects, conceptually replicating and extending the findings from Scheepers et al. (2011). Most crucially, the observed bi-directionality of cross-domain structural priming strongly supports the notion of shared syntactic representations (or recursive procedures to generate and parse them) between arithmetic and language

Disentangling syntactic, semantic and pragmatic impairments in ASD : elicited production of passives

Children with ASD and an IQ-matched control group of typically developing (TD) children completed an elicited-production task which encouraged the production of reversible passive sentences (e.g., “Bob was hit by Wendy”). Although the two groups showed similar levels of correct production, the ASD group produced a significantly greater number of “reversal” errors (e.g., “Wendy was hit by Bob”, when, in fact Wendy hit Bob) than the TD group (who, when they did not produce correct passives, instead generally produced semantically appropriate actives; e.g., “Wendy hit Bob”). These findings suggest that the more formal elements of syntax are spared relative to more semantic/pragmatic/narrative aspects (e.g., manipulating thematic roles) in at least high-functioning children with ASD

The lexical boost effect is not diagnostic of lexically-specific syntactic representations

Structural priming implies that speakers/listeners unknowingly re-use syntactic structure over subsequent utterances. Previous research found that structural priming is reliably enhanced when lexical content is repeated (lexical boost effect). A widely held assumption is that structure-licensing heads enjoy a privileged role in lexically boosting structural priming. The present comprehension-to-production priming experiments investigated whether head-constituents (verbs) versus non-head constituents (argument nouns) contribute differently to boosting ditransitive structure priming in English. Experiment 1 showed that lexical boosts from repeated agent or recipient nouns (and to a lesser extent, repeated theme nouns) were comparable to those from repeated verbs. Experiments 2 and 3 found that increasing numbers of content words shared between primes and targets led to increasing magnitudes of structural priming (again, with no ‘special’ contribution of verb-repetition). We conclude that lexical boost effects are not diagnostic of lexically-specific syntactic representations, even though such representations are supported by other types of evidence