Target Complexity Modulates Syntactic Priming During Comprehension

Syntactic priming is known to facilitate comprehension of the target sentence if the syntactic structure of the target sentence aligns with the structure of the prime (Branigan et al., 2005; Tooley and Traxler, 2010). Such a processing facilitation is understood to be constrained due to factors such as lexical overlap between the prime and the target, frequency of the prime structure, etc. Syntactic priming in SOV languages is also understood to be influenced by similar constraints (Arai, 2012). Sentence comprehension in SOV languages is known to be incremental and predictive. Such a top-down parsing process involves establishing various syntactic relations based on the linguistic cues of a sentence and the role of preverbal case-markers in achieving this is known to be critical. Given the evidence of syntactic priming during comprehension in these languages, this aspect of the comprehension process and its effect on syntactic priming becomes important. In this work, we show that syntactic priming during comprehension is affected by the probability of using the prime structure while parsing the target sentence. If the prime structure has a low probability given the sentential cues (e.g., nominal case-markers) in the target sentence, then the chances of persisting with the prime structure in the target reduces. Our work demonstrates the role of structural complexity of the target with regard to syntactic priming during comprehension and highlights that syntactic priming is modulated by an overarching preference of the parser to avoid rare structures.