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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...

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Autores principales: Husain, Samar, Yadav, Himanshu
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7094757/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32256432
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00454
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author Husain, Samar
Yadav, Himanshu
author_facet Husain, Samar
Yadav, Himanshu
author_sort Husain, Samar
collection PubMed
description 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.
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spelling pubmed-70947572020-04-01 Target Complexity Modulates Syntactic Priming During Comprehension Husain, Samar Yadav, Himanshu Front Psychol Psychology 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. Frontiers Media S.A. 2020-03-18 /pmc/articles/PMC7094757/ /pubmed/32256432 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00454 Text en Copyright © 2020 Husain and Yadav. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Psychology
Husain, Samar
Yadav, Himanshu
Target Complexity Modulates Syntactic Priming During Comprehension
title Target Complexity Modulates Syntactic Priming During Comprehension
title_full Target Complexity Modulates Syntactic Priming During Comprehension
title_fullStr Target Complexity Modulates Syntactic Priming During Comprehension
title_full_unstemmed Target Complexity Modulates Syntactic Priming During Comprehension
title_short Target Complexity Modulates Syntactic Priming During Comprehension
title_sort target complexity modulates syntactic priming during comprehension
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7094757/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32256432
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00454
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