Syntactic priming of relative clause attachments: persistence of structural configuration in sentence production

Three sentence completion experiments will be reported in which participants had to generate German equivalents of "the servant of the actress who..." (NP-of-NP-RC) constructions. Target fragments (which were unconstrained as to whether the relative pronoun permitted high or low attachment) were preceded by constrained prime fragments, which were either structurally congruent with the targets (Experiments 1 and 2) or structurally incongruent with the targets (anaphoric adverbial clauses rather than relative clauses (RCs), Experiment 3). While the first two experiments established reliable repetition of RC attachments between primes and targets, Experiment 3 failed to obtain a significant priming effect, indicating that RC attachment priming is dependent on a syntactic overlap between primes and targets. The results suggest a tendency of language producers to retain hierarchical syntactic relations over consecutive trials. Current models of syntactic priming in production do not offer an explanatory mechanism for this kind of observation as they presently stand.     

Persistence of emphasis in language production: A cross-linguistic approach

This study investigates the way in which speakers determine which aspects of an utterance to emphasize and how this affects the form of utterances. To do this, we ask whether the binding between emphasis and thematic roles persists between utterances. In one within-language (Dutch-Dutch) and three cross-linguistic (Dutch-English) structural priming experiments, we measured persistence effects for four different Dutch transitives (actives, PP-initial passives, PP-medial passives, and PP-final passives). Whereas English allows only one passive (PP-final passive), Dutch allows three different variants with the same functional assignment, but different constituent structures. Additionally, the degree of emphasis on the agent differs significantly between the PP-initial passive and the other passives (Experiment 1). Experiment 2 showed persistence of actives, PP-medial, and PP-final passives in Dutch, but no priming between passives with different constituent structures. Experiments 3 and 4, however, showed that both PP-medial and PP-final passives prime the use of English passives. Experiment 5 confirmed that the emphasis on thematic roles persists: the proportion of passives in the PP-initial passive condition fell midway between the proportions produced in the active and PP-medial passive condition.     

Lexically-driven syntactic priming

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.     

The role of the anterior left hemisphere in real-time sentence comprehension: evidence from split intransitivity

We investigate Broca's sentence comprehension as an impairment on normal syntactic composition: the slow-syntax hypothesis (SSH). Experiment 1 examines comprehension of object-relative clauses (Wh-movement). Experiment 2 examines comprehension of sentences with unaccusative verbs (NP-movement), which like passives, base-generate their theme-argument in object position. Guided by the SSH, both experiments test the prediction that syntax-dependent effects such as "gap-filling" are observable but in a delayed fashion. Results show that whereas no priming was obtained at the point of the trace, antecedent reactivation emerged 650 and 800 ms after the verb (for Wh- and NP-movement respectively). This shows, contrary to dependency-based generalizations, that Broca's patients are able to successfully implement dependencies, albeit in a protracted manner. Given the localization value provided by Broca's aphasia, this supports the notion that the temporal implementation of syntactic structure formation (i.e., the requirement that it be fast and automatic) depends on the integrity of the anterior left hemisphere.     

Does sunshine prime loyal? Affective priming in the naming task

Recent work has found an affective priming effect using the naming task: In pronouncing target words, pronunciation latencies were consistently shorter when the target (e.g., loyal) was preceded by an evaluatively congruent (e.g., sunshine) rather than incongruent prime word (e.g, rain). Using the naming task, no affective priming was found in the present studies irrespective of prime-set size and target-set size (Experiment 1), irrespective of stimulus-onset asynchrony (Experiment 2), and even when a nearly exact replication of previous work that demonstrated the effect was conducted (Experiment 3). Finally, bilingual German/English speakers exhibited strong associative priming, but no affective priming, in both the English as well as the German language (Experiment 4). The results show that priming for evaluatively related words is not a general finding.     

Strategic effects in associative priming with words,homophones, and pseudohomophones

G. Lukatela and M. T. Turvey (1994a) showed that at a 57-ms prime-presentation duration, the naming of a visually presented target word (frog) is primed not only by an associate word (toad) but also by a homophone (towed) and a pseudohomophone (tode) of the associate. At a 250-ms prime presentation, priming with the homophone was no longer observed. In Experiment 1, the authors replicated these priming effects in the Dutch language. Next, the authors extended the priming paradigm to a word/legal-nonword lexical decision task (Experiments 2 and 3) and a word/pseudohomophone decision task (Experiment 4). Phonologically mediated associative priming was observed in all conditions with pseudohomophonic primes but not with homophonic primes. The latter did not prime at a 250-ms prime-presentation time and at 57 ms in the word/pseudohomophone task.     

Testing the direct-access model: GOD does not prime DOG

In three repetition priming experiments that employed identical (e.g., DOG-DOG) and reversed repetitions (e.g., GOD-DOG), it was found that relative to controls (e.g., DOG-DOG), GOD-type words did not prime DOG-type words. Also, neither DUT-type nor TUD-type nonwords primed DUT-type nonwords. In Experiments 1 and 2, these results occurred using both long- and short-term repetition priming conditions, respectively. In Experiment 3, the word results held under conditions of short-term priming coupled with stimulus misorientation. However, the nonword results resembled the word results (i.e., identical but not reversed repetitions primed nonwords). The failure to provide explicit evidence for direct visual access (e.g., GOD does not prime DOG while DOG does) irrespective of other sources of lexical activation supports theories of word recognition that postulate multiple and varied lexical representations that are activated through a matrix of connections.     

Neural correlates of Dutch Verb Second in speech production

Dutch speakers with agrammatic Broca's aphasia are known to have problems with the production of finite verbs in main clauses. This performance pattern has been accounted for in terms of the specific syntactic complexity of the Dutch main clause structure, which requires an extra syntactic operation (Verb Second), relative to the basic Subject-Object-Verb order surfacing in Dutch subordinate clauses. We report an fMRI study into the question whether this syntactic complexity is reflected in increased brain activation correlated with the production of Dutch main clause word order, in speakers without language impairment. Nineteen healthy subjects performed a covert sentence completion task, during which main and subordinate clauses were alternately elicited in a block design. Results show a left middle to superior frontal cluster of activation correlated to production of Verb-Second over Verb-Final clauses, with no activation in the opposite contrast. This activation pattern is counter to what might be expected from the frequency distribution of main and subordinate clauses. We conclude that the Verb-Second deviation from the basic Dutch SOV word order costs extra neural resources and that this also underlies the agrammatic problems with the production of finite verbs in Dutch main clauses.     

Antecedent Priming at Trace Positions: Evidence from German Scrambling

In Chomsky's theory of grammar, syntactic representations are said to contain movement traces, i.e., syntactically active but phonetically null copies of displaced constituents. Correspondingly, traces have been claimed to form part of the processing of sentence structure by showing that at trace sites the parser reactivates a moved constituent. This view has been contested, however, by researchers arguing that experimental findings can better be explained in terms of direct associations between subcategorizers and arguments. Against this background, we investigate antecedent reactivation effects in scrambled double-object constructions of German in two cross-modal priming experiments. We found significant priming effects at positions at which a movement analysis of these constructions would postulate an empty category, thus suggesting that the antecedent is indeed reactivated at the gap position. The Direct Association Hypothesis, on the other hand, cannot account for the priming effects we found. Implications for processing and for syntactic analyses of scrambling in German will be discussed.     

Recognizing cognates and interlingual homographs: Effects of code similarity in language-specific and generalized lexical decision

In four experiments, we investigated how cross-linguistic overlap in semantics, orthography, and phonology affects bilingual word recognition in different variants of the lexical decision task. Dutch-English bilinguals performed a language-specific or a generalized lexical decision task including words that are spelled and/or pronounced the same in English and in Dutch and that matched one-language control words from both languages. In Experiments 1 and 3, "false friends" with different meanings in the two languages (e.g., spot) were presented, whereas in Experiments 2 and 4 cognates with the same meanings across languages (e.g., film) were presented. The language-specific Experiments 1 and 2 replicated and qualified an earlier study (Dijkstra, Grainger, & Van Heuven, 1999). In the generalized Experiment 3, participants reacted equally quickly on Dutch-English homographs and Dutch control words, indicating that their response was based primarily on the fastest available orthographic code (i.e., Dutch). In Experiment 4, cognates were recognized faster than English and Dutch controls, suggesting coactivation of the cognates' semantics. The nonword results indicate that the bilingual rejection procedure can, to some extent, be language specific. All results are discussed within the BIA+ (bilingual interactive activation) model for bilingual word recognition.     

Paired-associate learning and priming effects in amnesia: a neuropsychological study

Despite severe deficits of recall and recognition, amnesic patients can exhibit normal priming effects. Amnesic patients have also been reported to perform well on tests of paired-associate learning that involve related word pairs (e.g., table-chair). The present study investigated the role of priming effects in paired-associate learning. Experiment 1 illustrated the distinction between the memory impairment of amnesic patients and their intact priming ability. Amnesic patients were markedly deficient in learning unrelated word pairs, despite exhibiting normal priming as measured by a word-completion test involving the same words. In Experiment 2A, amnesic patients showed good paired-associate learning for related word pairs, though control subjects still performed significantly better. In addition, the good performance by amnesic patients was short-lived, and performance fell to baseline after a 2-hr delay. Control subjects performed well above baseline at all delay conditions. Experiment 2B showed that the forgetting of related word pairs by amnesic patients followed the same time course as the decay of word priming. Experiment 3 showed that amnesic patients were as good as control subjects at learning related word pairs when incidental learning and test procedures were used (a word-association test). The advantage of control subjects over amnesic patients in Experiments 2A and 2B could therefore be attributed to the explicit learning instructions that are standard in paired-associate tests. Finally, Experiment 4 showed that amnesic patients exhibited normal priming when they were asked to "free associate" to words (e.g., child) that were semantically related to previously presented words (e.g., baby). The results indicate that both priming effects and paired-associate learning of related word pairs depend on activation, a process that is preserved in amnesia. Activation can account for the findings of good performance by amnesic patients on tests of word priming (Experiments 1 and 2B), related paired associates (Experiments 2A and 2B), and word association (Experiments 3 and 4). Activation is a transient phenomenon presumed to operate on and facilitate access to preexisting representations. Control subjects can establish new associations and can strengthen preexisting associations by engaging processes that are impaired in amnesia. As a result, when explicit learning instructions are used to test paired-associate learning of related word pairs, control subjects can learn better and can remember longer than can amnesic patients (Experiments 2A and 2B).(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)     

The functional unit in phonological encoding: evidence for moraic representation in native Japanese speakers

Speech production studies have shown that the phonological form of a word is made up of phonemic segments in stress-timed languages (e.g., Dutch) and of syllables in syllable-timed languages (e.g., Chinese). To clarify the functional unit of mora-timed languages, the authors asked native Japanese speakers to perform an implicit priming task (A. S. Meyer, 1990, 1991). In Experiment 1, participants could speed up their production latencies when initial consonant and vowel (CV) of a target word were known in advance but failed to do so when the vowel was unknown. In Experiment 2, prior knowledge of the consonant and glide (Cj) produced no significant priming effect. However, in Experiment 3, significant effects were found for the consonant-vowel coupled with a nasal coda (CVN) and the consonant with a diphthong (CVV), compared with the consonant-vowel alone (CV). These results suggest that the implicit priming effects for Japanese are closely related to the CV-C and CV-V structure, called the mora. The authors discuss cross-linguistic differences in the phonological representation involved in phonological encoding, within current theories of word production.     

Knowledge of a second language influences auditory word recognition in the native language

Many studies in bilingual visual word recognition have demonstrated that lexical access is not language selective. However, research on bilingual word recognition in the auditory modality has been scarce, and it has yielded mixed results with regard to the degree of this language nonselectivity. In the present study, we investigated whether listening to a second language (L2) is influenced by knowledge of the native language (L1) and, more important, whether listening to the L1 is also influenced by knowledge of an L2. Additionally, we investigated whether the listener's selectivity of lexical access is influenced by the speaker's L1 (and thus his or her accent). With this aim, Dutch-English bilinguals completed an English (Experiment 1) and a Dutch (Experiment 3) auditory lexical decision task. As a control, the English auditory lexical decision task was also completed by English monolinguals (Experiment 2). Targets were pronounced by a native Dutch speaker with English as the L2 (Experiments 1A, 2A, and 3A) or by a native English speaker with Dutch as the L2 (Experiments 1B, 2B, and 3B). In all experiments, Dutch-English bilinguals recognized interlingual homophones (e.g., lief [sweet]-leaf /li:f/) significantly slower than matched control words, whereas the English monolinguals showed no effect. These results indicate that (a) lexical access in bilingual auditory word recognition is not language selective in L2, nor in L1, and (b) language-specific subphonological cues do not annul cross-lingual interactions.     

Syntactic priming in 3- and 4-year-old children: evidence for abstract representations of transitive and dative forms

The current studies used a syntactic priming paradigm with 3- and 4-year-old children. In Experiment 1, children were asked to describe a series of drawings depicting transitive and dative relations to establish baseline production levels. In Experiment 2, an experimenter described a similar series of drawings using one of two syntactic forms (i.e., active/passive for transitive; double-object/prepositional for dative). Children were then asked to describe pictures identical to those shown in the corresponding baseline procedure. In both transitive and dative conditions, 4-year-old children were more likely to use a particular syntactic form if it had been used by the experimenter. Three-year-old children did not show priming effects, but their production of transitive sentences was higher following transitive primes than in Experiment 1. In Experiment 3, an additional group of 3-year-olds participated in a procedure in which they repeated the experimenter's sentences before describing the pictures. This procedure yielded significant priming effects for transitive and dative forms. These results indicate that very young children possess abstract syntactic representations, but that their access to these representations is sensitive to task demands.     

Constituent order and semantic parallelism in online comprehension: Eye-tracking evidence from German

Reading times for the second conjunct of and-coordinated clauses are faster when the second conjunct parallels the first conjunct in its syntactic or semantic (animacy) structure than when its structure differs (Frazier, Munn, & Clifton, 2000; Frazier, Taft, Roeper, & Clifton, 1984). What remains unclear, however, is the time course of parallelism effects, their scope, and the kinds of linguistic information to which they are sensitive. Findings from the first two eye-tracking experiments revealed incremental constituent order parallelism across the board—both during structural disambiguation (Experiment 1) and in sentences with unambiguously case-marked constituent order (Experiment 2), as well as for both marked and unmarked constituent orders (Experiments 1 and 2). Findings from Experiment 3 revealed effects of both constituent order and subtle semantic (noun phrase similarity) parallelism. Together our findings provide evidence for an across-the-board account of parallelism for processing and-coordinated clauses, in which both constituent order and semantic aspects of representations contribute towards incremental parallelism effects. We discuss our findings in the context of existing findings on parallelism and priming, as well as mechanisms of sentence processing.     

Asymmetrical cross-language priming effects

Three experiments were conducted to examine cross-language priming in bilinguals. The first was a cross-language primed lexical decision task experiment with Chinese-English bilinguals. Subjects made lexical decisions about primary associate targets in the two languages at the same rate, but priming occurred only when the prime was in their first language (L1), Chinese, and the target was in their second language (L2), English. Experiment 2 produced the same pattern of asymmetrical priming with two alphabetic languages, French and Dutch. In Experiment 3, the crucial stimuli were translation equivalents. In contrast to the results of Experiments 1 and 2, priming occurred across languages in both the L1-L2 and L2-L1 conditions. However, this priming was also asymmetrical, with more priming occurring in the L1-L2 condition. A tentative separate-interconnected model of bilingual memory is described. It suggests that the representations of words expressed in different languages are stored in separate memory systems, which may be interconnected via one-to-one links between same translation-equivalent representations as well as meaning-integration processes.     

Phonological phrase boundaries constrain the online syntactic analysis of spoken sentences

Two experiments tested whether phonological phrase boundaries constrain online syntactic analysis in French. Pairs of homophones belonging to different syntactic categories (verb and adjective) were used to create sentences with a local syntactic ambiguity (e.g., [le petit chien mort], in English, the dead little dog, vs. [le petit chien] [mord], in English, the little dog bites, where brackets indicate phonological phrase boundaries). An expert speaker recorded the sentences with either a maximally informative prosody or a minimally informative one. Participants correctly assigned the appropriate syntactic category to the target word, even without any access to the lexical disambiguating information, in both a completion task (Experiment 1) and an abstract word detection task (Experiment 2). The size of the experimental effect was modulated by the prosodic manipulation (maximally vs. minimally informative), guaranteeing that prosody played a crucial role in disambiguation. The authors discuss the implications of these results for models of online speech perception and language acquisition.     

Children's and adults' perception of missing subjects in complement clauses: Evidence from another language

Findings on perception of missing subjects in complement clauses are reported in two experiments with school-aged children and adults. The complement clauses were embedded into four matrix verbs in Greek, such as Ask (ask information), Promise, Tell₁ (orderl command), and Tell₂ (give information) equivalent to English in syntactic and semantic constraints. The data from Experiment 1 show the following: (1) Perception of missing subjects in Ask, Promise, and Tell₁ complement clauses is significantly higher than in Tell₂, but Guttman coefficient of scalability (.58) was slightly lower than the required one (over .60) to document a developmental sequence between the four constructions. (2) In general, these results, as other findings, contradict with Minimal Distance Principle (MDP) advocated by Chomsky (1969, 1972). (3) Differences in perceiving the source (i.e., NP₁) in Ask and Promise and the goal/recipient (i.e., NP₂) as subject in the complement clauses on Tell₁ and Tell₂ cannot consistently be explained by the Semantic Role Principle (SRP) postulated by Maratsos (Lederberg & Maratsos, 1981; Maratsos, 1974) either. (4) Results from Experiment 2 with three age groups, despite minor differences, confirm the results in Experiment 1, suggesting that comprehension of complement clauses with Ask, Promise, and Tell₁ is a prerequisite to comprehension of complement clauses with Tell₂, according to Guttman coefficients of scalability (over .60 for all groups). (5) The findings are discussed within the framework of the SRP, but the emphasis is placed on the interaction of semantic and pragmatic presuppositions over processing the four construction types.The order of the authors is alphabetical.     

熟练中-英双语者对多义词早期识别中语义和语法的相互作用

以中、英文的多义词为材料, 采用跨语言隐蔽启动的实验范式, 考察在无语境条件下熟练中–英双语者对多义词的早期识别。结果表明：(1)熟练中–英双语者表现出显著的隐蔽翻译启动效应, 当目标词是主要翻译对等词时, 启动效应更加显著。(2)翻译对等词的性质、多义词的义项联系程度以及是否是词类歧义词都影响熟练中–英双语者对中、英多义词的早期加工。(3)在无语境条件下, 词类信息在意义通达的早期就已经激活, 并且同语义信息之间存在着交互作用。根据研究结果, 扩展和修正了分布式概念表征模型。