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Syntactic priming in spoken sentence production - an online study
1School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, B15 2TT, Birmingham, UK. smithm@psg-fs5.bham.ac.uk
Cognition
|November 14, 2000
Summary
Syntactic priming speeds sentence production by 50 ms. This effect, observed in online picture description tasks, is not due to word retrieval or visual perception, but is specific to the initial phrase generation before speech onset.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Psychology
- Computational Linguistics
Background:
- Syntactic priming, the tendency for speakers to reuse syntactic structures, is a well-documented phenomenon.
- Understanding the cognitive mechanisms underlying syntactic priming is crucial for models of language production.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the online syntactic priming effect using a picture description task.
- To determine the scope and underlying mechanisms of syntactic persistence in sentence production.
Main Methods:
- Six experiments employed a picture description task with varying prime-target sentence syntactic relationships.
- Latency measurements, picture previewing, and manipulation of task instructions were used to isolate the priming effect.
- Varying syntactic complexity of prime sentences examined the scope of the effect.
Main Results:
- A facilitation effect of approximately 50 ms was observed for syntactically related prime sentences.
- The priming effect persisted even when controlling for lemma access and visual perception.
- Priming was specific to the initial phrase of an utterance and disappeared when participants focused on naming movements.
Conclusions:
- Online syntactic priming facilitates sentence production by influencing the generation of the initial utterance phrase.
- The effect is not attributable to lexical or conceptual priming, but rather to syntactic structure selection.
- Syntactic persistence is a key mechanism in real-time language production.
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