Alexandra Cleland & Martin Pickering
University of Edinburgh
Three experiments investigated the priming of noun phrase production using a confederate-scripted dialogue method (Branigan et al., 2000). Experiment 1 found that it is possible to prime the production of noun phrase structures containing a pre-nominal adjective (e.g., "the red book") vs. a post-nominal phrase (e.g., "the book that's red"): 19% more target structures had the same structure as the prime than the alternative. The magnitude of priming was over twice as large (27%) when the noun was repeated between prime and target versus when it was not (12%). Apart from demonstrating priming at the level of the noun phrase, the results also indicate that lexical overlap increases the magnitude of priming. The results are interpreted in terms of the model of the lemma stratum developed by Pickering and Branigan (1998), where each noun node (e.g., for "book") is linked to syntactic nodes corresponding to constructions in which the adjective either precedes or follows the noun, and which predicts the enhanced effect of lexical overlap.
At this point, we outline an extension to Pickering and Branigan's account that incorporates influence from the conceptual stratum (Levelt et al., 1999). Concepts are linked to semantically related concepts, so the concept "whale" should be linked to "shark". Both of these are linked to their corresponding lemma nodes. We demonstrate why this predicts that priming should be enhanced by the presence of semantically related words in prime and target. Experiment 2 tested this prediction by investigating the priming of "red whale" / "whale that is red" by primes containing the same noun, a related noun ("shark") or an unrelated noun ("door"). In accord with predictions, priming for the related noun (31%) was stronger than priming for an unrelated noun (8%), but priming for the same noun was strongest (47%).
Given that semantic relatedness leads to enhanced syntactic priming, an interactive account (e.g., Dell, 1986) allowing feedback from the phonological stratum to the lemma stratum might predict that strong phonological relatedness would lead to enhanced syntactic priming. However, a modular account predicts no feedback and thus no effect of phonological overlap. Experiment 3 therefore replaced the semantically related noun ("whale") with a highly phonologically related noun ("wheel"). The priming effect of phonologically related nouns was identical to the effect of unrelated nouns (11%), in contrast to a 31% effect of identical nouns. In this respect at least, phonology does not affect syntactic encoding.
References
Branigan, H. P., Pickering, M. J., & Cleland, A. A. (2000). Syntactic coordination in dialogue. Cognition, 75, B13-B25.
Dell, G. S. (1986). A spreading-activation theory of retrieval in sentence production. Psychological Review, 93, 283-321.
Levelt, W. J. M., Roelofs, A., & Meyer, A. S. (1999). A theory of lexical access in speech production. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 1-75.
Pickering, M. J., & Branigan, H. P. (1998). The representation of verbs: Evidence from syntactic priming in language production. Journal of Memory and Language, 39, 633-651.