Syntactic Priming Effects Research Articles

Flowing With the Syntax: The Influence of Taoism on Syntactic Priming Effects

Syntactic priming is a linguistic phenomenon where the exposure to a specific grammatical structure increases the likelihood that the same structure will be used in subsequent language production. Previous research has shown that these syntactic processes are influenced by a broad range of linguistic, cognitive, and social factors. In the present research, we focused on the role of religious systems in shaping syntactic priming in dialog. Based on the observation that the Taoist concept of “moving with flow” encourages individuals to adapt to the natural flow of life and circumstances, we hypothesized that Taoists might modify their syntactic choices to foster better connections with their interlocutors. We conducted two studies to test our theoretical perspective. As predicted, Study 1 found that Taoists were more likely to mirror the syntax used by their interlocutors in dialog than their atheist counterparts. In Study 2, we compared the magnitude of syntactic priming effects between Taoists and Buddhists. The results showed that Taoists demonstrated a stronger preference for using the same syntactic structure as their conversational partners than Buddhists. In sum, our findings provide the first empirical evidence that beliefs and values associated with religious systems exert a significant influence on syntactic priming effects.

The Conscious Side of 'Subliminal' Linguistic Priming: A Systematic Review With Meta-Analysis and Reliability Analysis of Visibility Measures.

Research on unconscious processing has been a valuable source of evidence in psycholinguistics for shedding light on the cognitive architecture of language. The automaticity of syntactic processing, in particular, has long been debated. One strategy to establish this automaticity involves detecting significant syntactic priming effects in tasks that limit conscious awareness of the stimuli. Criteria for assessing unconscious priming include the visibility (d') of masked words not differing significantly from zero and no positive correlation between visibility and priming. However, such outcomes could also arise for strictly methodological reasons, such as low statistical power in visibility tests or low reliability of dependent measures. In this study, we aimed to address these potential limitations. Through meta-analysis and Bayesian re-analysis, we find evidence of low statistical power and of participants having above-chance awareness of 'subliminal' words. Moreover, we conducted reliability analyses on a dataset from Berkovitch and Dehaene (2019), finding that low reliability in both syntactic priming and visibility tasks may better explain the absence of a significant correlation. Overall, these findings cast doubt on the validity of previous conclusions regarding the automaticity of syntactic processing based on masked priming effects. The results underscore the importance of revisiting the methods employed when exploring unconscious processing in future psycholinguistic research.

Exploring the Influencing Factors of the Syntactic Priming Effect in French Learners

Abstract: The syntactic priming effect, a prevalent and common linguistic phenomenon, has captured the keen interest of scholars within the realm of second language acquisition, leading to a wealth of insightful research findings. This study focuses on the syntactic priming effect specifically observed in learners of French as a second language. It meticulously reviews the research paradigms frequently adopted in prior experiments and consolidates the influencing factors of the French syntactic priming effect into two primary categories: internal learner factors and external linguistic factors. By scrutinizing these factors, the study uncovers the intricacies that shape the priming effect in French language learning. Furthermore, it pinpoints the limitations inherent in current research endeavors and proposes avenues for future investigations. The ultimate goal of this study is to offer some valuable insights that can help teachers to adapt their teaching methods and enhance French language teaching practices, fostering more effective learning outcomes for students.

Exploring the Influence of Syntactic Structures on English Syntactic Priming

Abstract: English syntactic structures are essential components in the process of learning English as a second language (ESL) and play a critical role in the acquisition process. Based on previous research, this paper discusses the impact of syntactic structures on English L2 syntactic priming among Chinese learners from three perspectives: research paradigms, priming structures, and the factors influencing priming effects. The findings indicate that, given syntactic structure interchangeability, different syntactic structures exhibit varying degrees of priming effects. Key factors such as L2 proficiency, syntactic usage preferences, and language structureincluding both structural differences within English and similarities between the learner's native language and Englishsignificantly affect the extent of these priming effects. These insights not only contribute to further research on English L2 syntactic priming but also provide practical guidance for ESL teaching, highlighting the importance of understanding these dynamics to improve language acquisition and instructional strategies. It also enables English as a second language learners to fully understand the mechanisms of syntactic priming effects, providing them with scientific learning methods, thereby allowing them to learn English more efficiently.

Syntactic Priming Effects During the Comprehension of Passive Voice in Portuguese

Syntactic priming refers to the facilitation that occurs in the processing of a given complex syntactic structure when the speaker has been previously exposed to the same structure or to a similar one. Using a self-paced reading task, we investigate the effects of syntactic priming during the comprehension of passive sentences in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). Adult native speakers of BP read target passive sentences in primed and unprimed conditions, with verb repetition between prime and target in both conditions. Our results show that participants read target sentences faster in the primed than in the unprimed condition, that is, after having been exposed to the same syntactic structure in a previous sentence. These findings indicate that, at least in part, the processing of passive voice was facilitated by repeated exposure to the syntactic structure. We interpret these results as evidence of syntatic persistence and residual activation.

Now You See Me, Now You don’t: Children Learn Grammatical Choices During Online Socially Contingent Video and Audio Interactions

ABSTRACT Previous research has established that children’s experiences of language during in-person interactions (e.g. individual and cumulative experiences of structural choices) implicitly shape language learning. We investigated whether children also implicitly learn structural choices during online interactions, and whether this is affected by the visual co-presence of a partner. During an online conference call, three- and five-year-olds alternated describing pictures with an experimenter who produced active (“a cat chased the dog”) and passive (“the dog was chased by a cat”) prime descriptions; half the participants had video+audio calls, and half had audio-only. Children in both age groups produced more passives after passive than active primes, both immediately and with accumulating input across trials; neither effect was influenced by call format (video+audio vs audio-only). These results demonstrate that implicit grammar learning mechanisms, as evidenced by syntactic priming effects, operate during socially contingent online interactions. They also highlight the potential of online methodologies for developmental language production research.

Integration of input and expectations influences syntactic parses, not just sentence interpretation.

Interpreting a sentence can be characterized as a rational process in which comprehenders integrate linguistic input with top-down knowledge (e.g., plausibility). One type of evidence for this is that comprehenders sometimes reinterpret sentences to arrive at interpretations that conflict with the original language input. Does this reflect a reinterpretation of only the message, or also of earlier stages of linguistic representation such as the syntactic parse? The present study relies both on comprehension questions as a measure of the eventual interpretation (as in past work) and on syntactic priming as an implicit measure of the eventual parse of a sentence. Plausible dative sentences yielded a classic syntactic priming effect. Implausible dative sentences, for which a plausible alternative version corresponded to the alternate dative structure, not only tended to be interpreted as the plausible alternative, but also showed no priming effect from the perceived syntactic structure. These results suggest that the plausibility of a message can not only impact the interpretation of a perceived sentence, but also its underlying syntactic representation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Investigating syntactic priming cumulative effects in MT-human interaction.

A question that deserves to be explored is whether the interaction between English language learners and the popular Google neural machine translation (GNMT) system could result in learning and increased production of a challenging syntactic structure in English that differs in word order between speakers first language and second language. In this paper, we shed light on this issue by testing 30 Brazilian Portuguese L2 English speakers in order to investigate whether they tend to describe an image in English with a relation of possession between nouns using a prepositional noun phrase (e.g. the cover of the book is red) or re-use the alternative syntactic structure seen in the output of the GNMT (e.g. the book cover is red), thus manifesting syntactic priming effects. In addition, we tested whether, after continuous exposure to the challenging L2 structure through Google Translate output, speakers would adapt to that structure in the course of the experiment, thus manifesting syntactic priming cumulative effects. Our results show a robust syntactic priming effect as well as a robust cumulative effect. These results suggest that GNMT can influence L2 English learners linguistic behaviour and that L2 English learners unconsciously learn from the GNMT with continuous exposure to its output.

Testing the automaticity of syntax using masked visual priming

ABSTRACT Language comprehension proceeds at a very fast pace. It is argued that context influences the speed of language comprehension by providing informative cues. How syntactic contextual information influences the processing of incoming words is, however, less known. Here we employed a masked syntactic priming paradigm in four behavioural experiments in the German language to test whether masked primes automatically influence the categorisation of nouns and verbs. We found robust syntactic priming effects with masked primes but only when verbs were morpho-syntactically marked. Furthermore, we found that, compared to baseline, primes slow down target categorisation when the relationship between prime and target is syntactically incorrect, rather than speeding it up when the relationship is syntactically correct. This argues in favour of an inhibitory nature of syntactic priming. Overall, the data indicate that humans automatically extract syntactic features from the context to guide the analysis of incoming words during online language processing.

Primed progressives? Predicting aspectual choice in World Englishes

AbstractThis corpus-based study focuses on the progressive:non-progressive alternation from a novel perspective, i.e. the effect of syntactic priming. We annotated a dataset of 5,000 progressive and non-progressive occurrences in ten different varieties of English from theInternational Corpus of Englishfor variables such as Aktionsart categories and elements related to priming and subjected the data to a generalized linear mixed methods tree analysis. The results indicate that the progressive is most likely to occur in situations that are durative in nature and when they are preceded by another progressive; overall, we find some evidence of probabilistic indigenization with regard to the use of progressives in different varieties. However, while syntactic priming seems to play a role overall in the choice of the progressive over the non-progressive, we do not find evidence supporting the idea that priming may explain the use of non-standard stative progressives.

When the independence of syntactic representation meets the sentence processing of Mandarin: Evidence from syntactic priming.

There is no consensus on whether syntactic representation is independent of semantic representation in Mandarin. In four experiments, we adopted the syntactic priming paradigm to investigate the independence of syntactic representation in Mandarin. Experiments 1 and 2 investigated the priming effects of double object construction (DO) and prepositional object construction (PO) with the ditransitive verb being repeated across the prime and target. Experiment 1 showed two-way priming effects of DO and PO. Experiment 2 showed that the syntactic priming effects persisted regardless of whether the semantic features (animacy of the Theme) matched across the prime and target or not. Furthermore, such effects persisted in Experiments 3 and 4 where the ditransitive verb across the prime and target was not repeated. Taken together, these findings provide evidence that syntactic/semantic independence is universal and favoured over the traditional Chinese grammar account, which claims that the syntactic representation of Mandarin is not independent of the semantic representation.

Investigating syntactic priming cumulative effects in MT-human interaction

Background: A question that deserves to be explored is whether the interaction between English language learners and the popular Google neural machine translation (GNMT) system could result in learning and increased production of a challenging syntactic structure in English that differs in word order between speakers first language and second language. Methods: In this paper, we shed light on this issue by testing 30 Brazilian Portuguese L2 English speakers in order to investigate whether they tend to describe an image in English with a relation of possession between nouns using a prepositional noun phrase (e.g. the cover of the book is red) or re-use the alternative syntactic structure seen in the output of the GNMT (e.g. the book cover is red), thus manifesting syntactic priming effects. In addition, we tested whether, after continuous exposure to the challenging L2 structure through Google Translate output, speakers would adapt to that structure in the course of the experiment, thus manifesting syntactic priming cumulative effects. Results: Our results show a robust syntactic priming effect as well as a robust cumulative effect. Conclusions: These results suggest that GNMT can influence L2 English learners linguistic behaviour and that L2 English learners unconsciously learn from the GNMT with continuous exposure to its output.

Syntactic priming reveals an explicit syntactic representation of multi-digit verbal numbers

When we say or understand verbal numbers, a major challenge to the cognitive system is the need to process the number's syntactic structure. Several studies showed that number syntax is handled by dedicated processes, however, it is still unclear how precisely these processes operate, whether the number's syntactic structure is represented explicitly, and if it is – what this representation looks like. Here, we used a novel experimental paradigm, syntactic priming of numbers, which can examine in detail the syntactic representation of multi-digit verbal numbers. In each trial, the participants – Arabic-Hebrew bilinguals and Hebrew monolinguals – heard a multi-digit number and responded orally with a random number. The syntactic structure of their responses was similar to that of the targets, showing that they represented the verbal number's syntax. This priming effect was genuinely syntactic, and could not be explained as lexical – repeating words from the target; as phonological – responding with words phonologically-similar to the target; or as a numerical distance effect – producing responses numerically close to the target. The syntactic priming effect was stronger for earlier words in the verbal number and weaker for later words, suggesting that the syntactic representation is capped by working-memory limits. We propose that syntactic priming could become a useful method to examine various aspects of the syntactic representation of numbers.

The Persistence of Priming: Exploring Long‐lasting Syntactic Priming Effects in Children and Adults

The implicit learning account of syntactic priming proposes that the same mechanism underlies syntactic priming and language development, providing a link between a child and adult language processing. The present experiment tested predictions of this account by comparing the persistence of syntactic priming effects in children and adults. Four-year-olds and adults first described transitive events after hearing transitive primes, constituting an exposure phase that established priming effects for passives. The persistence of this priming effect was measured in a test phase as participants described further transitive events but no longer heard primes. Their production of passives was compared to a baseline group who described the same pictures without any exposure to primes. Neither immediate nor long-term priming effects differed between children and adults but both children and adults showed significant immediate and persistent effects of the priming when the test phase occurred immediately after the exposure phase and when a short delay separated the exposure and test phase. The implications of these results for an implicit learning account of syntactic priming are discussed.

Selective activation of language specific structural representations: Evidence from extended picture-word interference

How do bilingual speakers represent and use information that guides the assembly of the words into phrases and sentences (i.e., sentence structures) for languages that have different word orders? Cross-language syntactic priming effects provide mixed evidence on whether bilinguals access sentence structures from both languages even when speaking just one. Here, we compared English monolinguals, Korean-immersed Korean-English bilinguals, and English-immersed Korean-English bilinguals while they produced noun phrases (“the lemon below the lobster”), which have different word orders in English and Korean (the Korean translation word order is [lobster][below][lemon]). We examined when speakers plan each noun using an extended picture-word interference paradigm, by measuring articulation times for each word in the phrase with either the distractor word “apple” (which slows the planning of “lemon”) or “crab” (which slows the planning of “lobster”). Results suggest that for phrases that are different in linear word order across languages, bilinguals only access the sentence structure of the one language they are actively speaking at the time, even when switching languages between trials.

L2 Syntactic Priming Effect in Production and Comprehension of Korean Movement Construction

L2 Syntactic Priming Effect in Production and Comprehension of Korean Movement Construction

Syntactic Priming Effects and their Underlying Mechanisms in Language Production and Comprehension

Exposure to a syntactic structure influences the way we process a similar syntactic structure in language production and comprehension in what has been called ‘syntactic priming’. Syntactic priming is a robust phenomenon which can be observed in spoken and written production, with a range of syntactic constructions in laboratory tasks and naturally occurring samples of speech, in many languages, and also across languages within the same speaker. It has been used as a vehicle for exploring language production, language comprehension, and the relationship between them. Research in syntactic priming has made it the dominant means of investigating the processes involved in language production and comprehension. Some researchers propose that there are distinct mechanisms underlying the production and comprehension of syntactic structures; however, other researchers suggest that the same mechanisms underlie syntactic priming in production and comprehension. Thus, the mechanisms underlying syntactic priming effects in production and comprehension are still under debate. Moreover, although a fairly large body of research has addressed syntactic priming in production or in comprehension, there are few studies that consider and compare priming effects in both of these modalities. Therefore, the current study reviews the literature on syntactic priming in production and contrasts these findings to those in comprehension. It also provides an overview of syntactic priming effects and mechanisms underlying these effects in both production and comprehension.

The effects of speaker accent on syntactic priming in second-language speakers

Syntactic priming studies in second language (L2) have contributed to understanding how L2 speakers’ syntactic knowledge is represented and processed. However, little is known about social influences on L2 speakers’ syntactic processing and learning. The present study investigated whether L2 speakers’ syntactic priming is influenced by social factors, specifically different accents of English speakers and their familiarity with those accents. Korean L2 learners of English with intermediate proficiency were asked to describe pictures depicting ditransitive events after listening to sentences recorded by three English speakers with different accents: a standard-accented speaker (an American English speaker), and two speakers with non-standard accents (a Korean English speaker and an Indian English speaker). The results of the picture description task showed that syntactic priming effects in Korean L2 English speakers were significantly influenced by speaker accents and their familiarity with the accents. In addition, their priming patterns and interactions with these factors changed over time. These results suggest that syntactic priming in L2 speakers is socially mediated. We propose that priming effects in real language use can be better accounted for using a combination of cognitive and sociolinguistic models of syntactic priming and speech production.

Syntactic Priming Effects on Active and Passive Sentence Production in Persons with Aphasia: Evidence from an Eye-tracking Study

Syntactic Priming Effects on Active and Passive Sentence Production in Persons with Aphasia: Evidence from an Eye-tracking Study

A Markov Mixed-Effect Multinomial Logistic Regression Model for Nominal Repeated Measures with an Application to Syntactic Self-Priming Effects

Syntactic priming effects have been investigated for several decades in psycholinguistics and the cognitive sciences to understand the cognitive mechanisms that support language production and comprehension. The question of whether speakers prime themselves is central to adjudicating between two theories of syntactic priming, activation-based theories and expectation-based theories. However, there is a lack of a statistical model to investigate the two different theories when nominal repeated measures are obtained from multiple participants and items. This paper presents a Markov mixed-effect multinomial logistic regression model in which there are fixed and random effects for own-category lags and cross-category lags in a multivariate structure and there are category-specific crossed random effects (random person and item effects). The model is illustrated with experimental data that investigates the average and participant-specific deviations in syntactic self-priming effects. Results of the model suggest that evidence of self-priming is consistent with the predictions of activation-based theories. Accuracy of parameter estimates and precision is evaluated via a simulation study using Bayesian analysis.