Kathryn Bock
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
To examine the relationship between syntactic processes in language comprehension and language production, the strength and persistence of structural priming were compared in parallel within- and cross-modality priming tasks. Bock and Griffin (2000) showed that the production of passive and dative priming sentences increased the probability of spontaneously using passives and datives to describe events in subsequent pictures that were semantically unrelated to the primes. These priming effects persisted across as many as ten intervening filler trials.
In the present research, Bock and Griffin's studies were replicated with the same materials and designs, but with one critical change in procedure. Rather than producing the priming sentences, participants only listened to them. In two experiments, the probabilities of producing the primed structures were examined after four intervals, either immediately after prime exposure or after one, two, four, or ten intervening fillers. The results indicated persistence of priming across all lags. The relative magnitudes of priming were the same as those observed by Bock and Griffin, suggesting that structural priming may be indifferent to the modality in which exposure occurs.
A third experiment examined whether priming from comprehension to production depends on explicit efforts to remember priming sentences. In the picture-description paradigms used to investigate structural priming over lags, priming sentences served as potential memory targets in a cover recognition task. In such circumstances, attempts to maintain a prime in memory could enhance priming and its durability. To reduce the likelihood of memory maintenance, priming sentences and target pictures were presented as negative foils, eliminating the possibility that the materials might later appear as memory targets. Accordingly, participants were merely exposed to the primes. The magnitude of priming was examined at three lags, after 0, 1, or 2 intervening fillers. Significant priming was observed at all lags, and the magnitude of priming with mere exposure was larger than priming with the cover memory task.
These findings add to mounting evidence that structural priming operates from comprehension to production (Branigan, Pickering, & Cleland, 2000; Potter & Lombardi, 1998; Weiner & Labov, 1983). The results go beyond existing evidence to suggest, unexpectedly, that priming is fairly indifferent to the modality in which a priming structure is experienced. This underscores the effectiveness of priming as an implicit learning mechanism, and raises new questions about the architecture of the language faculty and the embodiment of language performance within it.
References
Bock, J. K., & Griffin, Z. M. (2000). The persistence of structural priming: Transient activation or implicit learning? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 129, 177-192.
Branigan, H., Pickering, M., & Cleland, A. (2000). Syntactic co-ordination in dialogue. Cognition, 75, B13-B25.
Potter, M. C., & Lombardi, L. (1998). Syntactic priming in immediate recall of sentences. Journal of Memory and Language, 38(3), 265-282.
Weiner, E. J., & Labov, W. (1983). Constraints on the agentless passive. Journal of Linguistics, 19, 29-58.