Syntactic Priming in Immediate Recall of Sentences

Abstract

In two previous papers (Lombardi & Potter, 1992; Potter & Lombardi, 1990) we reported evidence that immediate recall of a sentence requires regeneration from the message level, rather than from a verbatim representation. However, participants tended to reproduce the surface syntax even when there were two meaning-equivalent surface structures available (e.g., for dative verbs, “gave the letter to her mother,” “gave her mother the letter”). In three experiments we tested the hypothesis that this verbatim bias is the result of syntactic priming (Bock, 1986). In Experiment 1 single sentences were recalled; the prime sentence preceded the target dative sentence. In Experiments 2 and 3 two-clause sentences were recalled; the second clause served as a prime that had been perceived but not yet recalled when the first clause was produced, or vice versa. When the prime sentence or clause was a dative that mismatched the surface structure of the target there was an increase in changes to the alternate (primed) structure in recall of the target, compared with control primes. These results support the hypothesis that simply perceiving a sentence is enough to prime its surface syntactic structure, contributing to verbatim recall.