Umeå University's logo

Four structural priming experiments investigated the lexical boost effect in structural priming. In two experiments, we tested whether repeating the subject in prepositional object or double object ditransitive structures boosted structural priming. In two other experiments, we manipulated the repetition of the verb. Repetition of the subject noun affected structural priming, but only when the prime remained visible while participants produced the target sentence. In contrast, repetition of the verb boosted priming regardless of whether participants could see the prime and target simultaneously. We conclude that the subject noun repetition effect is more strategic in nature than the verb boost effect. Structures are automatically associated with the verb, their syntactic head, whereas repetition of the subject noun only affects priming if the presentation method makes the repetition highly explicit.

Four structural priming experiments investigated whether the lexical boost is due to the repeated head verb of the primed structure or due to the repetition of any verb, testing structural priming of ditransitive structures (The hotel owner decided to loan the tourist a tent/a tent to the tourist). In Experiments 1–3, we manipulated the repetition of the matrix verb (decided) that is not the syntactic head in the primed structure. The results showed abstract structural priming of the embedded ditransitive structure but the repetition of the matrix verb did not boost the priming. In addition to manipulating the repetition of the matrix verb, we also manipulated the head verb of the primed structure (loan) in Experiment 4. It showed a lexical boost with the repetition of the head verb but no boost with the repetition of the matrix verb. These results are consistent with the residual activation model, which only predicts a boost from the verb that is the head of the primed structure. They do not support models which predict that the repetition of any lexical material in a sentence boosts priming.

In 1866, Holmgren published an account of the physiological action of light on the retina. The article is taken as the origin of research on the electroretinogram, although the term was not introduced until much later. We present a translation of the article into English and provide a commentary on its reception and significance.

Two experiments investigated whether the choice of anaphoric expression is affected by the presence of an addressee. Following a context sentence and visual scene, participants described a target scene that required anaphoric reference. They described the scene either to an addressee (Experiment 1) or without an addressee (Experiment 2). When an addressee was present in the task, participants used more pronouns and fewer repeated noun phrases when the referent was the grammatical subject in the context sentence than when it was the grammatical object and they used more pronouns when there was no competitor than when there was. They used fewer pronouns and more repeated noun phrases when a visual competitor was present in the scene than when there was no visual competitor. In the absence of an addressee, linguistic context effects were the same as those when an addressee was present, but the visual effect of the competitor disappeared. We conclude that visual salience effects are due to adjustments that speakers make when they produce reference for an addressee, whereas linguistic salience effects appear whether or not speakers have addressees.

Two structural-priming experiments investigated how bilinguals represent syntactic structures. According to the shared-syntax account (Hartsuiker, Pickering, & Veltkamp, 2004), bilinguals have a single syntactic representation for structures that exist in both languages, whereas separate-syntax accounts claim that the representations for these structures are language specific. Our experiments tested native speakers of Swedish who were highly proficient in English. The results showed that structural priming within language and between languages was equally strong. This indicates that representations of syntactic structures from different languages are shared and, therefore, supports the shared-syntax account.

We report an experiment in which participants first heard a context sentence and saw a picture, and then had to produce a coherent discourse by describing the action of a previously introduced referent in a target picture. They described the picture either to an addressee or in the absence of an addressee. The results showed that participants produced more pronouns and fewer repeated noun phrases when the referent was mentioned as the subject than the object in the preceding sentence and when a competitor was not mentioned in the preceding sentence than it was. These linguistic saliency effects were not affected by the presence or absence of an addressee. In contrast, the effect of visual presence of a competitor did interact with addressee presence. In the presence of an addressee, speakers produced more pronouns when there was no visually present competitor than when there was, but no such visual saliency effect occurred in the absence of an addressee. We conclude that speakers take into account the referent's visual saliency for the addressee's benefit, but the linguistic saliency effect is independent of whether the addressee is present.

A study of error detection in discourse is reported in which children 10 to 13 years old listened to set of expository texts read aloud, read the texts via a moving window simulated on a computer screen, or read them typed on paper. Occasional changes were introduced in the texts, resulting in illformedness at a semantic level, at a morpho-syntactic level, or (in reading) at an orthographic level. The subjects were 278 Swedish 4th and 6th grade pupils. Analysis of d' showed that all test groups performed above chance, that 6th grade children were better at the task, and that errors were easiest to detect while listening. By the same standard, detecting errors when reading was easier from hard copy. However, 4th graders detected both more othographic and morpho-syntactic errors when reading from the moving window, suggesting some advantage in presenting text to younger readers from left to right.