Structure prediction occurs when it is needed: Evidence from visual-world structural priming in Dutch comprehension

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Science
• Computational Linguistics

Background:

• Previous research on English dative sentences indicated lexically-dependent structural priming in comprehension.
• Studies in Mandarin comprehension revealed abstract (verb-independent) structural priming, particularly with unexpected structures (inverse preference priming).
• This inverse preference priming aligns with error-based implicit learning theories of structure prediction.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the mechanism of structure prediction (lexically-dependent vs. abstract) in Dutch sentence comprehension.
• To examine whether abstract structural priming occurs in Dutch, a language with a PO structure bias.
• To determine the conditions under which abstract structural priming is observed.

Main Methods:

• Conducted four visual-world comprehension experiments using Dutch sentences.
• Investigated structural priming effects with both repeated and different verbs between prime and target sentences.
• Analyzed eye-tracking data to infer comprehenders' structural predictions during sentence processing.

Main Results:

• Found evidence of structural priming in Dutch comprehension, occurring with both repeated and different verbs.
• Observed abstract structural priming, but only when the target sentence structure was relatively unpredictable.
• Comprehenders showed anticipatory eye movements consistent with predicting different sentence structures based on primes.

Conclusions:

• Dutch sentence comprehension involves both lexically-dependent and abstract structure prediction mechanisms.
• Abstract structural priming is more likely to occur when it is necessary for disambiguating sentence structure.
• Findings suggest structure prediction is an effortful process engaged when needed to resolve ambiguity in postverbal arguments.