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Related Experiment Video

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Persistent structural priming and frequency effects during comprehension.

Martin J Pickering1, Janet F McLean, Holly P Branigan

  • 1Department of Psychology, Edinburgh EH8 9JZ, United Kingdom. martin.pickering@ed.ac.uk

Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition
|June 27, 2012
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Participants" interpretation of ambiguous sentences was influenced by prior sentence context, demonstrating structural priming effects in language comprehension. These effects persisted regardless of verb overlap or intervening sentences.

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Area of Science:

  • Psycholinguistics
  • Cognitive Science
  • Computational Linguistics

Background:

  • Ambiguous prepositional phrases pose challenges in sentence comprehension.
  • Structural priming, where exposure to a sentence structure influences subsequent production or comprehension, is a known linguistic phenomenon.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the role of structural priming in resolving syntactic ambiguity, specifically high versus low attachment of prepositional phrases.
  • To determine if structural priming effects persist when prime and target sentences share the same verb or different verbs.
  • To examine the impact of intervening sentences (fillers) on the persistence of structural priming.

Main Methods:

  • Two experiments employed a sentence-picture matching task.
  • Participants were exposed to prime sentences with a specific interpretation of an ambiguous prepositional phrase.
  • Participants then interpreted a target sentence containing a similar ambiguous phrase.

Main Results:

  • Participants showed a bias to interpret the ambiguous prepositional phrase in the target sentence consistent with the prime sentence's interpretation.
  • This priming effect occurred irrespective of whether the prime and target sentences used the same or different verbs.
  • The presence of 1-2 unrelated filler sentences between prime and target did not diminish the priming effect.

Conclusions:

  • Structural priming effects, both lexically independent and lexically specific, occur during language comprehension.
  • These priming effects can persist even with intervening sentences and across different verbs.
  • A shared underlying mechanism may govern structural priming and frequency effects in comprehension.