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

Mental representation and processing of syntactic structure: evidence from Chinese

From the perspective of cognitive psychology, our knowledge of language can be viewed as mental representations and our use of language can be understood as the computation or processing of mental representations. This thesis explores the mental representation and processing of syntactic structure. The method used in this thesis is structural priming, a phenomenon in which people tend to repeat the linguistic structure that they have recently processed. The language under investigation is Chinese. The main research theme is divided up into four different questions. The first question is how syntactic structure is mentally represented. For a long time this has been a question for syntacticians whose main evidence is their intuition. There are, however, recent calls for experimental methods in the investigation of syntactic representation. I propose that structural priming can be used as an experimental approach to the investigation of syntactic representation. More specifically, structural priming can illuminate the constituent structure of a syntactic construction and help us determine which syntactic analysis corresponds to the representation of the construction. Three structural priming experiments on some controversial constructions in Mandarin were reported to show that structural priming can be used to distinguish alternative analyses of a syntactic construction. The second question concerns the use of thematic and lexical information in grammatical encoding in sentence production. Models of grammatical encoding differ in the locus of conceptual effects on grammatical encoding and the extent to which grammatical encoding is lexically guided. Five experiments were reported on these two issues. First, the results indicate that thematic information affects grammatical encoding by prompting the processor map thematic roles onto the same linear order as they were previously mapped. Though conceptual information was previously believed to only affect the assignment of grammatical functions (e.g., subject and object) to nouns (i.e., functional processing), this finding suggests that it can influence the linear order of sentence constituents (i.e., positional processing) as well. The results also show that the processor persists in using the same argument structure of the verb, implying that grammatical encoding is lexically guided to some extent. The third question concerns the processing of verb-phrase (VP) ellipsis in comprehension. Previous research on this topic disagrees on whether the interpretation of VP ellipsis is based over the syntactic or semantic representation of the antecedent and whether the antecedent representation is copied or reconstructed at the ellipsis site. An experiment was presented and the results show no structural priming effect from the ellipsis site. This suggests that no syntactic structure is reconstructed at the ellipsis and possibly no copying of the antecedent structure either. The results then favour a semantic account of VP ellipsis processing. The last question concerns the lexico-syntactic representation of cognates in Cantonese-Mandarin bilinguals. Previous research has paid little attention as to whether cognates have shared or distinct lemmas in bilinguals. Two experiments show that the structural priming effect from the cognate of a verb was smaller than from the verb itself, suggesting that Cantonese/Mandarin cognates have distinct rather than shared lemmas, though the syntactic information associated with cognates is collectively represented across the two languages. At the end of the thesis, I discussed the implications of these empirical studies and directions of further research

Thematic relations affect similarity via commonalities

Thematic relations are an important source of perceived similarity. For instance, the rowing theme of boats and oars increases their perceived similarity. The mechanism of this effect, however, has not been specified previously. We investigated whether thematic relations affect similarity by increasing commonalities or by decreasing differences. In Experiment 1, thematic relations affected similarity more than difference, thereby producing a non-inversion of similarity and difference. Experiment 2 revealed substantial individual variability in the preference for thematic relations and, consequently in the non-inversion of ratings. In sum, the experiments demonstrated a non-inversion of similarity and difference that was caused by thematic relations and exhibited primarily by a subgroup of participants. These results indicate that thematic relations affect perceived similarity by increasing the contribution of commonalities rather than by decreasing the contribution of differences

Cross-domain priming from mathematics to relative-clause attachment: a visual-world study in French

Human language processing must rely on a certain degree of abstraction, as we can produce and understand sentences that we have never produced or heard before. One way to establish syntactic abstraction is by investigating structural priming. Structural priming has been shown to be effective within a cognitive domain, in the present case, the linguistic domain. But does priming also work across different domains? In line with previous experiments, we investigated cross-domain structural priming from mathematical expressions to linguistic structures with respect to relative clause attachment in French (e.g., la fille du professeur qui habitait à Paris/the daughter of the teacher who lived in Paris). Testing priming in French is particularly interesting because it will extend earlier results established for English to a language where the baseline for relative clause attachment preferences is different form English: in English, relative clauses (RCs) tend to be attached to the local noun phrase (low attachment) while in French there is a preference for high attachment of relative clauses to the first noun phrase (NP). Moreover, in contrast to earlier studies, we applied an online-technique (visual world eye-tracking). Our results confirm cross-domain priming from mathematics to linguistic structures in French. Most interestingly, different from less mathematically adept participants, we found that in mathematically skilled participants, the effect emerged very early on (at the beginning of the relative clause in the speech stream) and is also present later (at the end of the relative clause). In line with previous findings, our experiment suggests that mathematics and language share aspects of syntactic structure at a very high-level of abstraction