Language-dependent Aspects of Structural Priming

Speakers must choose between different alternative sentence structures in speaking. Studies in English (Bock & Loebell, 1990; Pickering & Branigan, 1998) have shown that this choice can be explained by representations which make use of SYNTACTIC CATEGORIES (e.g. NP-PP , NP-NP, etc.). The equivalent structural choices in Japanese are made up of the same syntactic category (i.e. NP). Using a technique called structural priming, we examined whether Japanese speaker’s dative structural choices may be primed without syntactic category information. Japanese speakers were more likely to use the dative sentence in the order that we primed, even though the two syntactic structures did not differ in the order of syntactic categories. We also found that Japanese speakers do not relate dative and formally similar transitive structures in the same way that English speakers do. The results suggest that Japanese speakers can make use of representations that go beyond syntactic categories. The current results and English data may be better accounted for by a theory in which language learning plays an important part in organizing the processing system (Chang, et al. 2003, March). Questions • Can Japanese speakers show structural priming without differences in syntactic categories? • Can the same theory explain priming in English and Japanese? • Does language learning play a part in determining the organization of the sentence production system? Language-dependent Aspects of Structural Priming Hiroko Yamashita, Franklin Chang, & Yuki Hirose Rochester Institute of Technology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Electrocommunication Presented at the Architecture and Mechanism of Language Processing, 2003, Glasgow, UK Akiko-wa Tegami-o Sensei-ni kaita ########### 4 7 1 3 9 san? doozo sentence (250 msecs per word)