The use of syntax and information structure during language comprehension: Evidence from structural priming

Structural priming in comprehension seems to be more variable than in production. Sometimes it occurs without lexical overlap, sometimes it does not. This raises questions about the use of abstract syntactic structure and how it varies across tasks. We use a visual-world eye tracking judgment task and observe two kinds of priming effects. First, participants were more likely to switch to looking at the target referent immediately after the word when the syntactic structure of the target matched that of the prime. Second, participants also looked more to referents that could take on the thematic role that was in sentence-final position in the prime sentence, and thus in discourse focus. Critically, neither effect depended upon lexical overlap. Our results suggest that structural priming in comprehension manifests itself differently depending on situational demands, reflecting the activation of different levels of representation under different pressures.

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Error-based structure prediction in language comprehension: evidence from verb bias effect in a visual-world structural priming paradigm for Mandarin Chinese

10.31234/osf.io/u8ewb ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Xuemei Chen ◽

Suiping Wang ◽

Robert Hartsuiker

Keyword(s):

Mandarin Chinese ◽

Sentence Processing ◽

Language Comprehension ◽

Prediction Error ◽

Structure Prediction ◽

Time Windows ◽

Critical Time ◽

Structural Priming ◽

Visual World ◽

Verb Bias

Structural priming studies in production have demonstrated stronger priming effects for unexpected sentence structures (inverse preference effect). This is consistent with error-based implicit learning accounts that assume learning depends on prediction error. Such prediction error can be verb-specific, leading to strong priming when a verb that is for instance biased towards the prepositional object (PO) structure occurs with an unexpected double object (DO) structure. However, it is unclear whether this mechanism also holds for language comprehension, especially for languages like Mandarin Chinese, which arguably depends strongly on semantics to predict syntax in comprehension. Experiment 1 was a norming study (N=367) that measured the biases (DO vs. PO) of 48 Mandarin Chinese dative verbs. Experiment 2 (N=72) crossed verb bias (DO-bias or PO-bias) and structure (DO or PO) of prime sentences in a visual-world paradigm, to examine whether Mandarin comprehenders show an inverse preference effect. The priming effect is expressed as the proportion of looks to the predicted referent (i.e., the recipient after a DO-prime, the theme after a PO-prime), for two critical time windows during target sentence processing: the verb and the first syllable of the first post-verbal noun (which was identical in theme and recipient). There was priming in both time windows, even though the verb differed between prime and target. Importantly, there was an inverse preference effect (i.e., stronger priming after a DO prime with a PO-biased verb than with a DO-biased verb) in the second time window. These results provide evidence for an error-based structure prediction system in comprehension.

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Pragmatics and Information Structure

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199697960.013.10 ◽

2014 ◽

Author(s):

Gregory Ward ◽

Betty J. Birner ◽

Elsi Kaiser

Keyword(s):

Language Comprehension ◽

Information Structure ◽

Informational Content ◽

Linguistic Context ◽

Growing Body

Information structure deals with the question of how—and specifically, in what order—we choose to present the informational content of a proposition. In English and many other languages, this content is structured in such a way that given, or familiar, information precedes new, or unfamiliar, information. Because givenness and newness are largely matters of what has come previously in the discourse, information structuring is inextricably tied to matters of context—in particular, the prior linguistic context—and this is what makes information structure quintessentially pragmatic in nature. While it has long been recognized that various non-canonical word orders function to preserve a given-before-new ordering in an utterance, a great deal of research has focused on how to determine the specific categories of givenness and newness that matter for information structuring. A growing body of psycholinguistic work explores the role that these categories play in language comprehension.

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Persistent structural priming from language comprehension to language production☆☆☆

Cognition ◽

10.1016/j.cognition.2006.07.003 ◽

2007 ◽

Vol 104 (3) ◽

pp. 437-458 ◽

Cited By ~ 131

Author(s):

K BOCK ◽

G DELL ◽

F CHANG ◽

K ONISHI

Keyword(s):

Language Comprehension ◽

Language Production ◽

Structural Priming

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An experimental approach to linguistic representation

Behavioral and Brain Sciences ◽

10.1017/s0140525x16002028 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 40 ◽

Cited By ~ 44

Author(s):

Holly P. Branigan ◽

Martin J. Pickering

Keyword(s):

Information Structure ◽

Experimental Approach ◽

Syntactic Structure ◽

Structural Priming ◽

Substantial Evidence ◽

Semantic Level ◽

Thematic Relations ◽

Linguistic Representations ◽

Acceptability Judgments ◽

Do So

AbstractWithin the cognitive sciences, most researchers assume that it is the job of linguists to investigate how language is represented, and that they do so largely by building theories based on explicit judgments about patterns of acceptability – whereas it is the task of psychologists to determine how language is processed, and that in doing so, they do not typically question the linguists' representational assumptions. We challenge this division of labor by arguing that structural priming provides an implicit method of investigating linguistic representations that should end the current reliance on acceptability judgments. Moreover, structural priming has now reached sufficient methodological maturity to provide substantial evidence about such representations. We argue that evidence from speakers' tendency to repeat their own and others' structural choices supports a linguistic architecture involving a single shallow level of syntax connected to a semantic level containing information about quantification, thematic relations, and information structure, as well as to a phonological level. Many of the linguistic distinctions often used to support complex (or multilevel) syntactic structure are instead captured by semantics; however, the syntactic level includes some specification of “missing” elements that are not realized at the phonological level. We also show that structural priming provides evidence about the consistency of representations across languages and about language development. In sum, we propose that structural priming provides a new basis for understanding the nature of language.

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Information Structure and Language Comprehension

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199642670.013.21 ◽

2015 ◽

Author(s):

Elsi Kaiser

Keyword(s):

Reaction Time ◽

Language Comprehension ◽

Information Structure ◽

Major Research ◽

Psycholinguistic Research ◽

Prosodic Cues ◽

Research Findings ◽

The Relationship ◽

Syntactic Cues

This chapter explores the relationship between information structure and language comprehension from a psycholinguistic perspective. More specifically, it considers how information structure, when signalled by syntactic or prosodic cues, is processed during language comprehension. It begins with a brief review of some of the key psycholinguistic methods that have been used to investigate questions about information structure, including reaction-time-based measures, attention-based measures, and off-line methods. It then discusses major research findings regarding the comprehension of syntactic cues and prosodic cues to information structure. It also considers the relationship between prosody and information structure and its importance to our understanding of focus and focus alternatives. The article concludes by outlining broader issues and directions for psycholinguistic research on information structure.

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Shared syntactic representations in bilinguals

Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism ◽

10.1075/lab.20046.son ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Yoonsang Song ◽

Ryan K. Y. Lai

Keyword(s):

Information Structure ◽

Structural Priming ◽

Thematic Role ◽

Functional Level ◽

Constituent Structure ◽

Syntactic Information ◽

Share Information

Abstract The current study explores the nature of constituent-structure-independent structural priming across the two languages of bilinguals. Specifically, this study tests whether such cross-linguistic priming involves the priming of functional-level syntactic representations shared between the languages, which can be distinguished from the priming of mainly non-syntactic information (e.g., information structure, thematic-role order). Critical prime sentences consisted of Cantonese actives in the Object-Subject-Verb (OSV) order and passives where the patient was grammatically topicalized with the same topic particle. Target responses were produced in English actives or passives. The results show that robust priming from Cantonese Topic-Passives to English passives occurred, but no cross-linguistic priming was observed for Cantonese Topic-OSV active primes. The Topic-OSV active and Topic-Passive constructions share information structure, and are formed in different constituent structures from English actives and passives. Therefore, the robust cross-linguistic passive priming by Topic-Passive primes should in large part be ascribed to functional-level syntactic representations of passive constructions shared by Cantonese and English.

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A review on the cognitive function of information structure during language comprehension

Cognitive Neurodynamics ◽

10.1007/s11571-014-9305-1 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 8 (5) ◽

pp. 353-361 ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Author(s):

Lin Wang ◽

Xiaoqing Li ◽

Yufang Yang

Keyword(s):

Cognitive Function ◽

Language Comprehension ◽

Information Structure

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How abstract is syntax? Evidence from structural priming

10.31234/osf.io/s2bcf ◽

2019 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Jayden Ziegler ◽

Giulia Bencini ◽

Adele Eva Goldberg ◽

Jesse Snedeker

Keyword(s):

Strong Evidence ◽

Present Experiment ◽

Information Structure ◽

Event Structure ◽

Structural Priming ◽

Abstract Syntax ◽

Semantic Roles ◽

Abstract Content ◽

Semantic Event ◽

Lexical Content

In 1990, Bock and Loebell found that passives (e.g., The 747 was radioed by the airport’s control tower) can be primed by intransitive locatives (e.g., The 747 was landing by the airport’s control tower). This finding is often taken as strong evidence that structural priming occurs on the basis of a syntactic phrase structure that abstracts across lexical content, including prepositions, and is uninfluenced by the semantic roles of the arguments. However, all of the intransitive locative primes in Bock and Loebell contained the preposition by (by-locatives), just like the passive targets. Therefore, the locative-to-passive priming may have been due to the adjunct headed by by, rather than being a result of purely abstract syntax. The present experiment investigates this possibility. We find that passives and intransitive by-locatives are equivalent primes, but intransitive locatives with other prepositions (e.g., The 747 has landed near the airport control tower) do not prime passives. We conclude that a shared abstract, content-less tree structure is not sufficient for passive priming to occur. We then review the prior results that have been offered in favor of abstract tree priming, and note the range of evidence can be considerably narrowed—and possibly eliminated—once effects of animacy, semantic event structure, shared morphology, information structure, and rhythm are taken into account.

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