Structural Priming of Adjunct Position, 2017-2022

Four experiments investigated structural priming of adjunct phrase position in a sentence in order to investigate how they are represented. In Experiment 1, we manipulated the position of an adverb within the prime sentence: it appeared either before the verb (The driver frequently shaved) or after it (The driver shaved frequently). Participants read the prime sentence aloud and then described a target picture using a word or words underneath, for example, a picture of a sailor shaving with the word “carefully” underneath it. The target verb was either the same as in the prime (both “shaved”) or different (“stretched” and “shaved”). In Experiment 2, we manipulated the position of a temporal phrase in the prime sentence: it appeared either at the beginning of the sentence (e.g., “before breakfast the driver stretched”) or at the end (“the driver stretched before breakfast”). As in Experiment 1, we also manipulated verb repetition between the prime and target. Experiments 3 and 4 were the same as Experiments 1 and 2 respectively, but instead of manipulating verb repetition, we manipulated the repetition of either the adverb (Experiment 3) or the temporal phrase (Experiment 4).Previous studies investigating structural priming and the lexical boost have generally examined priming of argument structures such as in ditransitives (e.g., Pickering & Branigan, 1998) and active/passive sentences (e.g., Bock et al., 1992). In order to investigate how adjunct structures are represented, we conducted four structural priming experiments. In Experiments 1 and 3, we manipulated the position of an adverb within the prime sentence (e.g., “the driver frequently shaved” vs. “the driver shaved frequently”), whereas in Experiments 2 and 4, we manipulated the position of a temporal phrase (e.g., “before breakfast the driver stretched” vs. “the driver stretched before breakfast”). We also manipulated whether the prime verb was repeated in the target (Experiments 1 and 2) and whether the adverb or temporal phrase adjunct was repeated (respectively Experiments 3 and 4). Participants read the prime sentence aloud and then produced a target sentence by describing a picture (e.g., of a sailor shaving) using a word or words written underneath it (e.g., “before breakfast”). In all experiments, structural priming occurred in the absence of any word repetition, but the priming was stronger when either the verb, the adverb or the temporal phrase was repeated. This suggests that the position of adjunct phrases is associated with all (content) words in the sentence.