Abstract
Two eye-tracking experiments investigated what happens when people read pairs of sentences that have the same syntactic structure. Previous experiments have shown priming in online sentence processing only when critical lexical material overlaps between the prime and the target sentence. In the current study, participants were asked to read sentences containing modifier-goal ambiguities. Half of the target sentences were preceded by sentences with the same structure, and half were preceded by sentences with a different structure. In Experiment 1, the prime-target pairs had the same main verb. In Experiment 2, the prime-target pairs had different main verbs. Facilitated target sentence processing was observed in both Experiments 1 and 2 when the target sentences were preceded by a prime sentence with the same syntactic structure. These results provide the first evidence of lexically independent, between-sentence structural priming in online sentence comprehension.
Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
