関係節付加における統語的プライミング/語彙にドライヴされる統語的プライミング

本日の神経心理学勉強会より。

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

Scheepers C.

Cognition. 2003 Oct;89(3):179-205.

　

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.

Lexically-driven syntactic priming.

Melinger A, Dobel C.

Cognition. 2005 Nov;98(1):B11-20. Epub 2005 May 31.

　

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.