Related Experiment Video
Updated: May 9, 2026
07:36
Eye Tracking During Visually Situated Language Comprehension: Flexibility and Limitations in Uncovering Visual Context Effects
Published on: November 30, 2018
Priming prepositional phrase attachment: evidence from eye-tracking and event-related potentials
Megan A Boudewyn1, Megan Zirnstein, Tamara Y Swaab
1a Department of Psychology , University of California , Davis , CA , USA.
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (2006)
|July 18, 2013
Summary
Syntactic priming experiments show that reading sentences with similar structures facilitates processing complex sentence ambiguities. This suggests structural priming aids comprehension by aiding syntactic structure building.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Science
- Computational Linguistics
Background:
- Syntactic priming, where processing similar sentence structures facilitates comprehension, is well-documented.
- Noun-modifying expressions are typically harder to process than verb-modifying expressions in isolated sentences.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if structurally similar prime sentences facilitate processing of noun-attached modifiers in ambiguous sentences.
- To determine if this facilitation reflects syntactic structure building or semantic processes.
Main Methods:
- Three syntactic-priming experiments were conducted.
- Eye tracking (Experiment 1) and event-related potentials (ERPs) (Experiments 2 and 3) were used to measure processing.
- Readers' responses to sentences with temporary prepositional phrase attachment ambiguity were analyzed.
Main Results:
- Findings indicate that structural similarity in prime sentences influences the processing of ambiguous target sentences.
- Evidence suggests that syntactic priming plays a role in resolving temporary ambiguities, particularly those involving noun-attached modifiers.
Conclusions:
- Structural priming can facilitate the processing of syntactically ambiguous sentences, especially those with noun-attached modifiers.
- These results support accounts of syntactic priming that emphasize structure-building processes during language comprehension.
