We present a novel experimental technique using artificial language learning to investigate the relationship between structural priming during communicative interaction, and linguistic regularity. We use unpredictable variation as a test-case, because it is a wellestablished paradigm to study learners’ biases during acquisition, transmission and interaction. We trained participants on artificia...

To compare abstract structural and lexicalist accounts of syntactic processes in sentence formulation, we examined the effectiveness of nonidiomatic and idiomatic phrasal verbs in inducing structural generalizations. Three experiments made use of a syntactic priming paradigm in which participants recalled sentences they had read in rapid serial visual presentation. Prime and target sentences co...

Exposure to verb phrase ellipsis in English with double-object or prepositional ditransitive antecedents affects syntactic choices in subsequent sentence production, inducing speakers to favor the production of structures parallel to that to which the ellipsis is anaphoric. This result is readily explanable only if ellipsis sites contain or trigger access to syntactic structure (which causes pr...

One of the best known claims about human communication is that people's behaviour and language use converge during conversation. It has been proposed that these patterns can be explained by automatic, cross-person priming. A key test case is structural priming: does exposure to one syntactic structure, in production or comprehension, make reuse of that structure (by the same or another speaker)...

Using a structural priming paradigm, the details of sentence production model have been investigated substantially, specifically the processes in grammatical encoding level. Many studies provide evidence that the function assignment stage and the constituent assembly stage are processed separately in grammatical encoding. However, it is less known whether these two stages interact with each oth...

Syntactic priming effects, modelled as increase in repetition probability shortly after a use of a syntactic rule, have the potential to improve language processing components. We model priming of syntactic rules in annotated corpora of spoken dialogue, extending previous work that was confined to selected constructions. We find that speakers are more receptive to priming from their interlocuto...

Syntactic priming during language production is pervasive and well-studied. Hearing, reading, speaking or writing a sentence with a given structure increases the probability of subsequently producing the same structure, regardless of whether the prime and target share lexical content. In contrast, syntactic priming during comprehension has proven more elusive, fueling claims that comprehension ...

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 tech...

We report a replication and extension of Ferreira (2003), in which it was observed that native adult English speakers misinterpret passive sentences that relate implausible but not impossible semantic relationships (e.g., The angler was caught by the fish) significantly more often than they do plausible passives or plausible or implausible active sentences. In the experiment reported here, part...

Six experiments compared the effects of structural and functional encoding tasks on implicit and explicit memory for novel objects. Implicit memory was assessed with a possible-impossible object decision test, and explicit memory was assessed with a yes-no recognition test. Results revealed that recognition memory was higher after functional than after structural encoding tasks, whereas priming...