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Updated: Apr 7, 2026

Examining Online Syntactic Processing of Spoken Complex Sentences in Chinese Using Dual-Modal Interference Tasks
Published on: September 5, 2019
The lexical boost in structural priming: The syntactic head matters but adjacency does not
Roger P G van Gompel1, Robert J Hartsuiker2, Leila Kantola1
1Division of Psychology, Faculty of Health, University of Dundee.
Abstract:
Evidence for head-centered models of structural priming (e.g., Pickering & Branigan, 1998) comes from studies showing that structural priming is stronger when the head of the primed structure is repeated between prime and target than when it is not (the lexical boost effect), whereas the repetition of nonhead words does not affect structural priming (e.g., Carminati et al., 2019). However, the different effects of head and nonhead words might have been due to their different position in the sentence. For example, the head verb immediately preceded the primed structure in ditransitive sentences (the lawyer handed the celebrity the present/the present to the celebrity), whereas the nonhead subject did not. In the present study, we used prime and target sentences where the order of the head (verb) and nonhead (subject) was reversed compared with previous studies. Despite this, repetition of the head verb resulted in a lexical boost, but repetition of the nonhead subject did not. This supports head-centered structural priming models. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
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