Evidence for priming across intervening sentences during on-line sentence comprehension

Abstract

Three experiments investigated factors contributing to syntactic priming during on-line comprehension. In all of the experiments, a prime sentence containing a reduced relative clause was presented prior to a target sentence that contained the same structure. Previous studies have shown that people respond more quickly when a syntactically related prime sentence immediately precedes a target. In the current study, ERP and eye-tracking measures were used to assess whether priming in sentence comprehension persists when one or more unrelated filler sentences appear between the prime and the target. In experiment 1, a reduced P600 was found to target sentences both when there were no intervening unrelated fillers, and when there was one unrelated filler between the prime and the target. Thus, processing the prime sentence facilitated processing of the syntactic form of the target sentence. In experiments 2 and 3, eye-tracking experiments showed that target sentence processing was facilitated when three filler sentences intervened between the prime and the target. These experiments show that priming effects in comprehension can be observed when unrelated material appears after a prime sentence and before the target. We interpret the results with respect to residual activation and implicit learning accounts of priming.

Keywords:

• syntax
• priming
• sentence processing
• syntactic priming

Acknowledgements

This project was supported by awards from the National Science Foundation (#1024003) and from the National Institutes of Health (#1R01HD048914). The order of authorship is arbitrary.

Notes

1. Recent experiments provide evidence that exposure to a given syntactic form may have separable influence on the likelihood of selection and the timing of planning processes during speech production (Segaert et al., 2011, 2012).

2. The full list of items for this experiment, as well as Experiments 2 and 3, is available upon request from the senior author: [email protected]

3. In order to address whether baseline differences could have contributed to the pattern of results reported here, we conducted additional analyses for the determiner, using a pre-verb baseline instead of a pre-by baseline. The use of a pre-verb baseline for all critical words required extracting EEG epochs extending beyond 2300ms in length, which resulted in a large amount of rejected trials due to the presence of artifacts (epochs over 1000ms are atypical, due to signal drift and participant movement). For this reason, it was impossible to analyze effects at the noun using a pre-verb baseline. However, the results for the determiner using a pre-verb baseline were consistent with those reported below, which used a pre-by baseline. This suggests that the current pattern of results cannot be attributed to the choice of baseline.

4. The by-participants multi-level models were configured as follows:

Level 1: RT for person i, for item j = Boi + B1i (sentence type)j + eij

Level 2:  Boi = goo + uo

 B1i = g10 + u1

For the by-items models, transpose person and item.

5. One might argue that the implicit learning is for the connection between lexical entries and syntactic structures. If so, implicitly strengthening the connection between the verb ‘examined’ and the reduced relative clause structure would not necessarily facilitate processing a sentence that contained a different verb.

6. Segaert et al. (2011) have proposed a more detailed account under which specific combinatorial nodes are tied to specific lexical entries, but exposure to a given syntactic form affects all related combinatorial nodes.

7. We thank an anonymous reviewer for introducing this as a possibility.

8. We thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this issue.