Abstract
Experiencing a syntactic structure affects how we process subsequent instances of that structure. This phenomenon, called structural priming, is observed both in language production and in language comprehension. However, while abstract syntactic structures can be primed independent of lexical overlap in sentence production, evidence for structural priming in comprehension is more elusive. In addition, when structural priming in comprehension is found, it can often be accounted for in terms of participants’ explicit expectations. Participants may use the structural repetition over several sentences and build expectations, which create a priming effect. Here, we use a new experimental paradigm to investigate structural priming in sentence comprehension independent of lexical overlap and of participants’ expectations. We use an outcome dependent variable instead of commonly used online measures, which allows us to more directly compare these effects with those found in sentence production studies. We test priming effects in syntactically homogeneous and heterogeneous conditions on a sentence-picture matching task that forces participants to fully parse the sentences. We observe that, while participants learn the structural regularity in the homogeneous condition, structural priming is also found in the heterogeneous condition, in which participants do not expect any particular structure. In fact, we find that a single prime is enough to trigger priming. Our results indicate that–like in sentence production–structural priming can be observed in sentence comprehension without lexical repetition and independent of participants’ expectation.
Highlights
Language processing is a complex process that involves–among other steps–a lexical analysis to retrieve the meanings of words and a syntactic analysis to parse the words into a syntactic structure
The difficulty for finding structural priming in sentence comprehension without lexical support may stem from differences in the way syntactic processing takes place in production and in comprehension [19,20,21]
This paper addresses the issue of whether structural priming in sentence comprehension can be observed in a paradigm which is comparable to those used in production studies
Summary
Language processing is a complex process that involves–among other steps–a lexical analysis to retrieve the meanings of words and a syntactic analysis to parse the words into a syntactic structure. Several studies have demonstrated that the production of a syntactic structure is facilitated when this structure appears in the preceding sentence. This effect is called structural priming [1, 2]. In sentence production tasks such as sentence completion, sentence recall and picture description, participants tend to use the same abstract syntactic structure as the one to which they were previously exposed [1, 3,4,5,6]. Structural priming is observed even when the sentences do not share any lexical content, providing evidence for the idea that in sentence production the syntactic structure can be accessed and processed independent of meaning and sound [9]
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