Structural Priming and the Placement of Focus-Sensitive Particles

Abstract

The German focus-sensitive particle auch (‘too’) can associate with different constituents (ACs) in an utterance. In terms of position, it can precede or follow its AC. There is a strong preference for using preceding auch when the AC is the object. In three sentence fragment arrangement tasks, we investigated whether speakers are structurally primed by the context. To that end, we used context sentences as part of short dialogues with different particles: nur (‘only’), kein(e)(‘no’), both of which precede their AC, and nicht (‘not’), which follows its AC. The results show that the established preference for preceding auch is affected by the position of the particle in the context (following auch occurred more often when the context contained following nicht). Follow-up experiments rule out an explanation based on intonation (Experiment 2) or on the underlying syntactic structure (Experiment 3). We found clear surface structural priming effects for function words with effect sizes similar to those found in studies of structural priming for content words. Furthermore, the findings for sentences used in isolation can be extended to sentences that are part of short dialogues.