Structural Priming in a Picture-Sentence Verification Task

摘要

When people talk or write a sentence, there is a tendency to repeat a similar structure of an utterance which they recently produced, or experienced others produced. This tendency is called structural priming (Bock, 1986). It has been considered as strong evidence supporting the claim that the structure of a sentence (syntactic structure) has its own representation independent of individual lexical items because it occurs without repetition of any lexical items. However, the structural priming can be boosted when a content word is repeated (particularly, a verb). This indicates that knowledge of structure is not fully independent but interacts with lexical knowledge. In the current study, we examined the interaction between lexical knowledge and structure knowledge in a picture-sentence verification task.