Phrase Structure Priming Across Sentences: Facilitation or Reconfiguration?

Phrase Structure Priming Across Sentences: Facilitation or Reconfiguration? Alexandra K. Frazer (akf207@lehigh.edu) Department of Psychology, Lehigh University USA Padraig G. O’Seaghdha (pat.oseaghdha@lehigh.edu) Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science Program, Lehigh University, USA Abstract Structural priming, the tendency for speakers to reuse the structures of recent utterances (Bock, 1986) or to produce repeated structures more fluently, is well documented for structural selection, but less so for phrase structure generation. Priming of structural choices is long-lived, persisting across intervening utterances (Bock & Griffin, 2000), but priming of phrase structure does not survive even one intervening sentence (Wheeldon & Smith, 2003), suggesting that the processes may be different. Moreover, although Smith & Wheeldon (2001) found an initiation latency benefit of initial noun phrase priming, the main verb (move/s) was also constant. Here, we report a noun phrase structure repetition effect only when the entire verb phrase was also repeated. Because this effect is better accounted for as plan reconfiguration than as structural priming, previous reports of phrase level structural priming need to be reassessed. Keywords: Language production; grammatical encoding; structural priming; lexical boost; planning scope Structural Priming in Sentence Production For a quarter of a century, structural priming has been one of the most researched topics in the field of language production. Structural priming is the tendency to echo the syntactic structures of recently produced utterances (Pickering & Ferreira, 2008) with potential gains in fluency. For example, after producing sentence (a), people would be more likely to generate (b) than (c) in a picture description task (example from Bock & Griffin, 2000, p. 178). (a) (b) (c) The car‟s windshield was struck by a brick. The boy is being awakened by a noisy alarm. A noisy alarm awakened the boy. In addition, production of (b) may be more fluent following (a) than following a non-passive precursor. Such effects are ubiquitous in production, occurring across languages (Loebell & Bock, 2003), in written and spoken production (Pickering & Branigan, 1998), between speakers (Bock, Dell, Chang & Onishi, 2007), in aphasic speakers (Hartsuiker & Kolk, 1998), and in children (Huttenlocher, Vasilyeva, & Shimpi, 2004) (for a recent comprehensive review see Pickering & Ferreira, 2008). Furthermore, structural priming is not easily explained by repetition of themes, lexical items, or metrical relationships between the prime and target utterances, and has been interpreted as evidence for an abstract or isolable representation of syntax (see Pickering & Ferreira, 2008). Most models of sentence production make a distinction between functional and positional levels of grammatical encoding (Bock & Levelt, 1994; Garrett, 1976). During functional grammatical encoding, lexical items are selected with respect to grammatical roles, whereas during positional encoding words are linearized and linked to phonological information. One might expect structural priming to operate at both levels (Pickering & Ferreira, 2008). However, the available evidence suggests that the processes at the two levels may differ (Bock & Griffin, 2000; Smith & Wheeldon, 2001). The bulk of structural priming research has considered functional level priming, using syntactic choice data to determine whether priming has occurred (Bock, 1986; Pickering & Ferreira, 2008). Functional level priming is long-lived, persisting over multiple intervening sentence productions, and so may reflect adjustments to the mappings between meanings and syntactic expressions rather than short term activation of lexical or syntactic options (Bock & Griffin, 2000; Chang, Dell & Bock, 2006). Such high level mappings, however, are not transparently relevant to positional level processes. Positional level structural priming involves the linearization of words and may involve a phrasal planning scope. Thus, because they involve linearization of nouns (Bock & Warren, 1985), coordinate noun phrases are a good candidate for phrase structure priming. Smith and Wheeldon (2001) tested structural priming between both simple and compound noun phrases, reporting a benefit in initiation latency for primed compound phrases but no benefit for simple noun phrases. Importantly, the priming effect did not persist over even one intervening trial (Wheeldon & Smith, 2003). Wheeldon and Smith interpret this as evidence that positional level assembly processes facilitate the construction of a particular noun phrase structure, rather than reflecting the mappings from conceptual to grammatical representations that operate at the functional level. Thus, although functional and positional level priming may both be considered to be “structural”, they also involve distinct processes. Verb Phrase Repetition and Priming An important theoretical debate in the functional level literature concerns the potential role of lexical, and especially verb repetition in promoting structural persistence. Using measures of syntactic choice, Pickering and Branigan (1998) showed that when the verb was