Lexically-driven syntactic priming

• Published in: Cognition Vol. 98; no. 1; pp. B11 - B20
• Main Authors: Melinger, Alissa, Dobel, Christian
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Amsterdam Elsevier B.V 01.11.2005; Elsevier; Elsevier Science
• Subjects: Bias; Biological and medical sciences; Child; Cognition; Dative alternation; Dutch; Foreign Countries; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; German; Germany; Grammar; Grammar Lexicon Relationship; Humans; Indo European Languages; Language; Lexical Choice; Linguistics; Morphology (Languages); Native Speakers; Priming; Production and perception of spoken language; Psychology; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Sentence Production; Sentence Structure; Sentences; Speech; Speech Production; Syntactic features; Syntactic Priming; Syntactic Processing; Syntactic Structures; Syntax; Verbal Behavior; Verbal Tasks; Verbs; Visual Media; Vocabulary; West Germanic Languages; Word order; Germany; Sentence Production; Syntactic Priming; Dative alternation; Syntactic features; Human; Priming effect; German; Cognition; Verbal production; Language; Speech; Syntax; Dutch; Sentence
• ISSN: 0010-0277; 1873-7838
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2005.02.001

Syntactic priming studies demonstrate that exposure to a particular syntactic structure leads speakers to reproduce the same structure in subsequent utterances. Explanations for this phenomenon rely on either the retrieval of morphosyntactic features associated with the verb in the prime sentence or the preservation of the mapping between message and word sequences in the prime sentence. Two experiments test the featural account of syntactic priming. We used single word primes to investigate the dative alternation in German (Experiment 1) and Dutch (Experiment 2). Native speakers read ditransitive verbs that are restricted either to the prepositional (dative) or double object construction, followed by pictures that can be described with either structure. We find that a single verb in isolation is sufficient to bias speakers’ production preferences supporting lexically-driven accounts of syntactic priming.