Building Syntactic Structures in Speaking: A Bilingual Exploration

2003 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 184-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul J. A. Meijer ◽  
Jean E. Fox Tree
Keyword(s):  
Speech Production ◽  
Priming Effect ◽  
Target Sentence ◽  
Recall Task ◽  
Prepositional Phrase ◽  
Syntactic Priming ◽  
Syntactic Structures ◽  
Syntactic Form ◽  
English Bilingual ◽  
Distraction Task

Abstract. In a series of three experiments we investigated syntactic priming using a sentence recall task. Participants read and memorized a target sentence for later recall. After reading a prime sentence and engaging in a distraction task, they were asked to produce the target sentence aloud. Earlier investigations have shown that this task is sensitive to a syntactic priming effect. That is, the syntactic form of the prime sentence sometimes influences the syntactic form of the recalled target. In this paper we report on a variation on this task, using Spanish-English bilingual participants. In the first two experiments we replicated the prepositional phrase priming effect using English target sentences and Spanish prime sentences. In the final experiment we investigated two additional syntactic forms, using Spanish target sentences and English prime sentences. Implications for models of syntax generation and bilingual speech production are discussed.

Cross-Structural Priming

2011 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 227-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maaike Loncke ◽  
Sébastien M. J. Van Laere ◽  
Timothy Desmet
Keyword(s):  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Relative Clause ◽  
Priming Effect ◽  
Phrase Structure ◽  
Target Sentence ◽  
Prepositional Phrase ◽  
Sentence Completion ◽  
Structural Priming ◽  
Syntactic Structures

In this paper we show that attachment height (high vs. low attachment) of a modifier to a complex noun phrase (CNP; e.g., “the servant of the actress”), can be primed between dissimilar syntactic structures. In a sentence completion experiment, we found that the attachment height of a prepositional phrase (PP) in the prime sentence primed the attachment height of a relative clause (RC) in the target sentence. This cross-structural priming effect cannot be explained in terms of the priming of specific phrase-structure rules or even sequences of specific phrase-structure rules ( Scheepers, 2003 ), because the attachment of a PP to a CNP is generated by a different phrase-structure rule than the attachment of an RC. However, the present data suggest that the location at which the RC is attached to the CNP is mentally represented, independent of the specific phrase-structure rule that is attached, or by extension, that the abstract hierarchical configuration of the full CNP and the attached RC is represented ( Desmet & Declercq, 2006 ). This is the first demonstration of a cross-structural priming effect that cannot be captured by phrase-structure rules.

scholarly journals Evidence for robust abstract syntactic representations in production before age three

2020 ◽  
pp. 014272372090591
Author(s):  
Anouschka Foltz ◽  
Karolin Knopf ◽  
Kristina Jonas ◽  
Petra Jaecks ◽  
Prisca Stenneken
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Strong Evidence ◽  
Priming Effect ◽  
Young Age ◽  
Sentence Production ◽  
Syntactic Priming ◽  
Priming Effects ◽  
Phonological Working Memory ◽  
Syntactic Structures ◽  
Priming Process

This study investigated whether we can find reliable comprehension-to-production syntactic priming effects in children aged 2;0 to 2;11 and how phonological working memory and sentence production skills relate to the syntactic priming process. A finding of reliable syntactic priming effects would provide strong evidence that children’s syntactic representations are abstracted over individual lexical items. To test children at this young age, they were primed with simple and early-acquired transitive (e.g., tickling (a) baby) and unergative intransitive (e.g., running) syntactic structures. Children aged 2;7 to 2;11, primed with alternating prime structures, revealed a reliable syntactic priming effect. In addition, phonological working memory (moderated by age) and sentence production skills positively affected transitive productions. Children aged 2;0 to 2;6, primed either with alternating or cumulative prime structures, showed no priming effect. Together, the data indicate that children have robust abstract syntactic representations for the tested structures before age three and that both phonological working memory and production skills relate to children’s syntactic priming behavior, albeit in different ways.

scholarly journals Children's syntactic-priming magnitude: lexical factors and participant characteristics

2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 932-945 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANOUSCHKA FOLTZ ◽  
KRISTINA THIELE ◽  
DUNJA KAHSNITZ ◽  
PRISCA STENNEKEN
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Specific Language Impairment ◽  
Relative Clause ◽  
Priming Effect ◽  
Syntactic Priming ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Rc Structures ◽  
Syntactic Structures ◽  
Syntactic Skills ◽  
Participant Characteristics

ABSTRACTThis study examines whether lexical repetition, syntactic skills, and working memory (WM) affect children's syntactic-priming behavior, i.e. their tendency to adopt previously encountered syntactic structures. Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and typically developing (TD) children were primed with prenominal (e.g. the yellow cup) or relative clause (RC; e.g. the cup that is yellow) structures with or without lexical overlap and performed additional tests of productive syntactic skills and WM capacity. Results revealed a reliable syntactic-priming effect without lexical boost in both groups: SLI and TD children produced more RCs following RC primes than following prenominal primes. Grammaticality requirements influenced RC productions in that SLI children produced fewer grammatical RCs than TD children. Of the additional measures, WM positively affected how frequently children produced dispreferred RC structures, but productive syntactic skills had no effect. The results support an implicit-learning account of syntactic priming and emphasize the importance of WM in syntactic priming tasks.

Beyond syntactic priming: Evidence for activation of alternative syntactic structures

2011 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 258-283 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARINA VASILYEVA ◽  
HEIDI WATERFALL
Keyword(s):  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Syntactic Priming ◽  
Transitive Action ◽  
Passive Voice ◽  
Discourse Function ◽  
Syntactic Structures ◽  
Syntactic Form ◽  
Russian Speakers ◽  
English Speaking

ABSTRACTPriming methodology was previously used to investigate children's ability to represent abstract syntactic forms. Existing evidence indicates that following exposure to a particular syntactic structure (such as the passive voice), English-speaking children increase their production of that structure with new lexical items. In the present work, we utilize priming methodology to explore whether exposure to passive primes may increase children's production of sentences that have a different structure but share a similar purpose in discourse. We report three studies, two involving English- and Russian-speaking children, and a third involving Russian-speaking adults. Unlike English, Russian offers a variety of syntactic forms that emphasize the patient of a transitive action, thus fulfilling the discourse function of the passive. We found that English speakers increased the use of the particular syntactic form presented in the prime, whereas Russian speakers increased their production of several different syntactic forms used to emphasize the patient of the action.

The role of constituent order and level of embedding in cross-linguistic structural priming

2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 269-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
GUNNAR JACOB ◽  
KALLIOPI KATSIKA ◽  
NEILOUFAR FAMILY ◽  
SHANLEY E. M. ALLEN
Keyword(s):  
Priming Effect ◽  
Target Sentence ◽  
Structural Features ◽  
Structural Priming ◽  
Tree Representation ◽  
Priming Effects ◽  
Hierarchical Tree ◽  
Constituent Order

In two cross-linguistic priming experiments with native German speakers of L2 English, we investigated the role of constituent order and level of embedding in cross-linguistic structural priming. In both experiments, significant priming effects emerged only if prime and target were similar with regard to constituent order and also situated on the same level of embedding. We discuss our results on the basis of two current theoretical accounts of cross-linguistic priming, and conclude that neither an account based on combinatorial nodes nor an account assuming that constituent order is directly responsible for the priming effect can fully explain our data pattern. We suggest an account that explains cross-linguistic priming through a hierarchical tree representation. This representation is computed during processing of the prime, and can influence the formulation of a target sentence only when the structural features specified in it are grammatically correct in the target sentence.

scholarly journals An incremental model of second language speech production mechanisms: Developmental evidence from object ellipsis in second language Chinese speech production

2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 783-810
Author(s):  
Boping Yuan ◽  
Lulu Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Speech Production ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Recall Task ◽  
Early Stages ◽  
L2 Chinese ◽  
L1 Influence ◽  
Korean Speakers ◽  
Production Mechanisms ◽  
L2 Speech Production

Aims: This study investigates object ellipsis in English and Korean speakers’ second language (L2) Chinese speech production and the effects of first language (L1) influence in L2 Chinese speech production. Design: 59 English speakers and 64 Korean speakers at various Chinese proficiency levels, as well as 16 native speakers of Chinese, participated in the study. In addition to an acceptability judgement test, an utterance-recall task was employed in the study to prime participants for relevant structures. Findings: There are early stages where derivations, such as move, deletion, etc., are not implemented in L2 speech production, although at later stages L2 speech production mechanisms can converge with that of native speakers. No evidence of L1 influence is found, and L2 learners are found to behave differently in the utterance-recall task and the sentence acceptability judgement task. Originality: The study includes data from L2 Chinese learners from beginner to advanced levels and provides a comprehensive picture of structural priming effects on the development of L2 speech production. Implications: There is a discontinuity in the development of L2 speech production mechanisms, and the development of the mechanisms is incremental in nature. Mechanisms for L2 language comprehension are different from those for L2 speech production, at least as far as L2 at the early stages is concerned.

The processing of derivational morphology in Korean–English bilingual readers

2011 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 473-488 ◽  
Author(s):  
SAY YOUNG KIM ◽  
MIN WANG ◽  
IN YEONG KO
Keyword(s):  
Lexical Decision ◽  
Priming Effect ◽  
Response Times ◽  
Unrelated Word ◽  
Derivational Morphology ◽  
English Bilingual ◽  
Language Activation ◽  
Complex Words ◽  
Bilingual Readers ◽  
Cross Language

Three experiments using a priming lexical decision paradigm were conducted to examine whether cross-language activation occurs via decomposition during the processing of derived words in Korean–English bilingual readers. In Experiment 1, when participants were given a real derived word and an interpretable derived pseudoword (i.e., illegal combination of a stem and a suffix) in Korean as a prime, response times for the corresponding English-translated stem were significantly faster than when they had received an unrelated word. In Experiment 2, non-morphological ending pseudowords (i.e., illegal combination of a stem and an orthographic ending) were included, and this did not show a priming effect. In Experiment 3, non-interpretable derived pseudowords also yielded a significant priming effect just as the interpretable ones. These results together suggest that cross-language activation of morphologically complex words occurs independently of lexicality and interpretability.

Situationally independent prosodic phrasing

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Shari R. Speer ◽  
Paul Warren ◽  
Amy J. Schafer
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Speech Production ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Task Demands ◽  
Syntactic Ambiguity ◽  
Prosodic Phrasing ◽  
Constituent Structure ◽  
Syntactic Form ◽  
American Midwest ◽  
The Impact

AbstractA series of speech production and categorization experiments demonstrates that naïve speakers and listeners reliably use correspondences between prosodic phrasing and syntactic constituent structure to resolve standing and temporary ambiguity. Materials obtained from a co-operative gameboard task show that prosodic phrasing effects (e.g., the location of the strongest break in an utterance) are independent of discourse factors that might be expected to influence the impact of syntactic ambiguity, including the availability of visual referents for the meanings of ambiguous utterances and the use of utterances as instructions versus confirmations of instructions. These effects hold across two dialects of English, spoken in the American Midwest, and New Zealand. Results from PP-attachment and verb transitivity ambiguities indicate clearly that the production of prosody-syntax correspondences is not conditional upon situational disambiguation of syntactic structure, but is rather more directly tied to grammatical constraints on the production of prosodic and syntactic form. Differences between our results and those reported elsewhere are best explained in terms of differences in task demands.

The syntactic priming effect: Evoked response evidence for a prelexical locus

1986 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 250-272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincent J. Samar ◽  
Gerald P. Berent
Keyword(s):  
Priming Effect ◽  
Evoked Response ◽  
Syntactic Priming

Sex Differences in Working Memory

2008 ◽  
Vol 103 (1) ◽  
pp. 214-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashley Harness ◽  
Lorri Jacot ◽  
Shauna Scherf ◽  
Adam White ◽  
Jason E. Warnick
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Sex Differences ◽  
Memory Task ◽  
Stimulus Presentation ◽  
Verbal Working Memory ◽  
Recall Task ◽  
Free Recall Task ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Distraction Condition ◽  
Distraction Task

In two separate studies, sex differences in modal-specific elements of working memory were investigated by utilizing words and pictures as stimuli. Groups of men and women performed a free-recall task of words or pictures in which 20 items were presented concurrently and the number of correct items recalled was measured. Following stimulus presentation, half of the participants were presented a verbal-based distraction task. On the verbal working-memory task, performance of men and women was not significantly different in the no-distraction condition. However, in the distraction condition, women's recall was significantly lower than their performance in the no-distraction condition and men's performance in the distraction condition. These findings are consistent with previous research and point to sex differences in cognitive ability putatively resulting from functional neuroanatomical dissimilarities. On the visual working-memory task, women showed significantly greater recall than men. These findings are inconsistent with previous research and underscore the need for further research.

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