Year: 2007
Type: article
Abstract: Structural priming, i.e., the tendency to repeat linguistic material, can be explained by two alternative representational assumptions: either as the repetition of hierarchical representations generated by syntactic rules, or as the repetition of lexical sequences.We present two studies that test these explanations by investigating priming effects in a dialogue corpus.We compare syntactic constituents with distituents, i.e., part-of-speech pairs that cross constituent boundaries.We find a reliable short-term priming effect for constituents, but no priming for distituents.This result supports the rulebased view of priming, which does not predict priming of distituents.The data are incompatible with a sequence priming analysis, which cannot distinguish between constituents and distituents.In a second corpus study, we study long-term priming and find priming effects for both constituents and distituents.This indicates that the mechanism underlying longterm adaptation differs substantially from short-term priming.
Authors: David Reitter, Frank Keller
Institution: University of Edinburgh
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2183377711