Syntactic persistence in language production

Abstract

Activation processes appear to have an important impact on the mechanisms of language use, including those responsible for syntactic structure in speech. Some implications of this claim for theories of language performance were examined with a syntactic priming procedure. On each priming trial, subjects produced a priming sentence in one of several syntactic forms. They then viewed an unrelated event in a picture and described it in one sentence. The probability of a particular syntactic form being used in the description increased when that form had occurred in the prime, under presentation conditions that minimized subjects' attention to their speech, to the syntactic features of the priming sentences, and to connections between the priming sentences and the subsequent pictures. This syntactic repetition effect suggests that sentence formulation processes are somewhat inertial and subject to such probabilistic factors as the frequency or recency of use of particular structural forms. Two further experiments showed that this effect was not appreciably modified by variations in certain conceptual characteristics of sentences, and all three experiments found evidence that the effects of priming were specific to features of sentence form, independent of sentence content. The empirical isolability of structural features from conceptual characteristics of successive utterances is consistent with the assumption that some syntactic processes are organized into a functionally independent subsystem.