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Give and take: syntactic priming during spoken language comprehension
Malathi Thothathiri1, Jesse Snedeker
1Department of Psychology, Harvard University, William James Hall, 33 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. malathi@wjh.harvard.edu
Cognition
|February 9, 2008
Summary
Syntactic priming, where hearing a sentence structure influences subsequent production, was observed during spoken language comprehension. This demonstrates that abstract syntactic information plays a role in understanding language, not just in producing it.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Science
- Linguistics
Background:
- Syntactic priming is well-documented in language production.
- Syntactic priming in language comprehension is less understood and debated.
- Previous research suggests comprehension may rely more on lexical knowledge than abstract structures.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate syntactic priming during spoken language comprehension.
- To determine if abstract syntactic representations influence comprehension.
- To test for cross-verb priming in language understanding.
Main Methods:
- Three experiments involving spoken language comprehension.
- Participants acted out dative sentences (double-object and prepositional-object).
- Eye movements were recorded to measure processing during temporary argument structure ambiguity.
Main Results:
- Participants showed a preference for the recipient over the theme following double-object primes.
- This preference demonstrated syntactic priming across different verbs.
- Priming effects were observed during online language comprehension.
Conclusions:
- Abstract syntactic information plays a role in language comprehension, similar to production.
- Language comprehension is not solely dependent on lexical knowledge.
- Findings challenge the notion that comprehension is less structurally driven than production.
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