The Use of Syntax and Information Structure During Language Comprehension: Evidence From Structural Priming

Abstract

Structural priming in comprehension seems to be more variable than in production. Sometimes it occurs without lexical overlap, sometimes it does not. This raises questions about the use of abstract syntactic structure and how it varies across tasks. We use a visual-world eye-tracking judgment task and observe two kinds of priming effects. First, participants were more likely to switch to looking at the target referent immediately after the word when the syntactic structure of the target matched that of the prime. Second, participants also looked more to referents that could take on the thematic role that was in sentence-final position in the prime sentence, and thus in discourse focus. Critically, neither effect depended upon lexical overlap. Our results suggest that structural priming in comprehension manifests itself differently depending on situational demands, reflecting the activation of different levels of representation under different pressures.