A paradox of syntactic priming: why response tendencies show priming for passives, and response latencies show priming for actives

Speakers tend to repeat syntactic structures across sentences, a phenomenon called syntactic priming. Although it has been suggested that repeating syntactic structures should result in speeded responses, previous research has focused on effects in response tendencies. We investigated syntactic prim...

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Published inPloS one Vol. 6; no. 10; p. e24209
Main Authors Segaert, Katrien, Menenti, Laura, Weber, Kirsten, Hagoort, Peter
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States Public Library of Science 11.10.2011
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Subjects
Biology
Cognition & reasoning
Cognitive models
Experimental psychology
Experiments
Female
Foreign language learning
Humans
Information processing
Language
Linear Models
Linguistics
Male
Medical imaging
Medicine
Memory
Priming
Psychology
Reaction Time - physiology
Sentence structure
Sentences
Social and Behavioral Sciences
Speech
Studies
Syntactic processing
Syntactic structures
Syntax
Young Adult
Netherlands
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Summary:Speakers tend to repeat syntactic structures across sentences, a phenomenon called syntactic priming. Although it has been suggested that repeating syntactic structures should result in speeded responses, previous research has focused on effects in response tendencies. We investigated syntactic priming effects simultaneously in response tendencies and response latencies for active and passive transitive sentences in a picture description task. In Experiment 1, there were priming effects in response tendencies for passives and in response latencies for actives. However, when participants' pre-existing preference for actives was altered in Experiment 2, syntactic priming occurred for both actives and passives in response tendencies as well as in response latencies. This is the first investigation of the effects of structure frequency on both response tendencies and latencies in syntactic priming. We discuss the implications of these data for current theories of syntactic processing.
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Performed the experiments: KS. Analyzed the data: KS. Wrote the paper: KS. Conceived and designed experiment 1: KS LM PH. Conceived and designed experiment 2: KS KW PH. Edited the paper: PH.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0024209