Comprehension priming as rational expectation for repetition: Evidence from syntactic processing.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Psycholinguistics
• Computational Linguistics

Background:

• Repeated stimuli are processed faster than novel stimuli, a phenomenon known as priming.
• Priming is often explained by adaptive mechanisms, suggesting it arises from rational expectations based on environmental patterns.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether syntactic priming effects in language comprehension stem from rational expectations of repetition.
• To explore how comprehenders adapt to the statistical properties of linguistic input.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of natural language corpora to identify clustering of sentential complement (SC) structures.
• Between-groups self-paced reading studies to assess the impact of SC sentence clustering on processing speed.
• Bayesian belief update modeling to simulate and explain the observed sensitivity to syntactic clustering.

Main Results:

• Sentences with SC continuations exhibit clustering in natural language.
• Comprehenders exposed to clustered SC sentences show faster processing of repeated SC structures compared to those with spaced SCs.
• The degree of processing facilitation correlates with the learned expectation for repetition.

Conclusions:

• Syntactic priming effects are consistent with comprehenders rationally adapting to the statistical regularities of their linguistic environment.
• Expectation for repetition, driven by environmental clustering, underlies comprehension priming.
• Sensitivity to syntactic structure clustering is a learnable aspect of language comprehension.