Does verb bias modulate syntactic priming?

Abstract

In a corpus analysis of spontaneous speech Jaeger and Snider (2007) found that the strength of structural priming is correlated with verb alternation bias. This finding is consistent with an implicit learning account of syntactic priming: because the implicit learning model implemented by Chang (2002), Chang, Dell, and Bock (2006), and Chang, Dell, Bock, and Griffin (2000) uses probabilistic information about different verb–structure combinations to predict the form of sentences, it predicts that primes exert stronger priming when they are less expected, given the syntactic preference of their main verb. We tested this claim experimentally by comparing the strength of double-object dative priming (DO) and prepositional object dative priming (PO) between dative verbs with differing syntactic preferences in a syntactic priming experiment. The syntactic preferences of the prime and target verbs were first measured in a picture description experiment. Consistent with an implicit learning account, the results showed a verb–specific effect of inverse preference: the strength of DO-priming was modulated by the alternation bias of the dative verbs that were used in the primes.