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Lexically independent priming in online sentence comprehension
1Department of Psychology, University of California, Davis 95616, USA. mjtraxler@ucdavis.edu
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
|July 9, 2008
Summary
Syntactic priming occurs even without shared words. This study shows that reading sentences with similar structures facilitates comprehension, regardless of verb overlap, offering new insights into language processing.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Science
- Computational Linguistics
Background:
- Previous research indicated structural priming in sentence processing relies on shared lexical content.
- The role of syntactic structure independent of specific words in priming was unclear.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate lexically independent, between-sentence structural priming.
- To determine if syntactic structure alone can facilitate online sentence comprehension.
Main Methods:
- Two eye-tracking experiments were conducted.
- Participants read target sentences preceded by either structurally similar or dissimilar prime sentences.
- Prime-target pairs varied in main verb overlap (Experiment 1: same verb; Experiment 2: different verbs).
Main Results:
- Facilitated processing of target sentences was observed when preceded by structurally similar primes in both experiments.
- This facilitation occurred irrespective of whether the main verb was the same or different between prime and target sentences.
Conclusions:
- The findings provide the first evidence for lexically independent, between-sentence structural priming.
- Syntactic structure plays a significant role in facilitating sentence comprehension, separate from lexical repetition.
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