Holly P. Branigan

Syntactic priming in language production

People have a tendency to repeat the types of sentences they use during language production. Recent experimental work has shown that this phenomenon is at least partly due to syntactic priming, whereby the act of processing an utterance with a particular form facilitates processing a subsequent utterance with the same or a related form. In this review, we first provide an overview of the evidence for syntactic priming. The review will then explore the implications of this research for three different areas of language theory: the possible functional significance of syntactic priming in coordinating speakers during dialogue, the mechanisms underlying sentence production, and the nature of linguistic representation.

Syntactic priming in spoken production: Linguistic and temporal interference

Current evidence about the persistence of syntactic priming effects (Bock, 1986) is equivocal: Using spoken picture description, Bock and Griffin (2000) found that it persisted over as many as 10 trials; using written sentence completion, Branigan, Pickering, and Cleland (1999) found that it dissipated if even a single sentence intervened between prime and target. This paper asks what causes it to be long lasting. On one account, the rapid decay evidenced by Branigan et al. occurs because the task emphasizes conceptual planning; on another account, it is due to the written nature of their task. If conceptual planning is the cause, this might relate to planning the prime sentence or planning an intervening sentence. Hence we conducted an experiment with spoken sentence completion, contrasting no delay, an intervening sentence, and a pure temporal delay. The results indicated that strong and similar priming occurred in all three cases, therefore lending support to the claim that spoken priming is long lasting.

A Cross-Linguistic Perspective on Discourse Context and Syntactic Processing in Language Production

Communication is a co-operative process. The speaker’s purpose is to convey some information to the listener. The listener’s task is to extract this information and integrate it with existing knowledge. Although considerable progress has been made in studying the listener and the mechanisms responsible for information extraction and integration, much less is known about the mechanisms which underlie the speaker’s production of language. In particular, much of the existing evidence is limited to the production of isolated sentences. This chapter is, like Heydel and Murray’s chapter (this volume), concerned with the way in which previous context can affect syntactic processing during cross-linguistic language production. Our particular focus is on the relationship between features of the discourse context and the syntactic structure that a speaker assigns to a sentence. We will be especially concerned with the relationship between pragmatic theories and processing theories, and whether processing mechanisms which have been proposed for the production of isolated sentences can also account for context effects in production.

The morphosyntactic representation of language varieties: bivarietal syntactic priming

Manipulated factors: uf0d8 PRIME VARIETY: Half of the prime sentences were presented in Bernese German, the other half in Standard German uf0d8 VERB RELATION: Half of the sentence pairs contained completely different verbs, e.g. bachet – maut/malt; the other half contained the same verb (or the Standard German cognate verb), e.g. bachet – bachet/backt uf0d8 PRIME STRUCTURE: Prime sentences contained a prepositional phrase (PP) or a dative (DAT): PP: Das Nilpferd backt ein Brot für den Elefanten (the hippo bakes a cakeACC for the elefantPP) DAT: Das Nilpferd backt dem Elefanten ein Brot (the hippo bakes the elefantDAT a cakeACC) Stimuli: uf0d8 32 critical items consisting of a prime picture, a prime sentence and a target picture uf0d8 96 filler items with transitives and intransitives