An anticipatory effect of syntactic priming in processing of structurally ambiguous sentences

概要

論文の詳細を見る
Several previous studies on language comprehension found that processing difficulty due to structural ambiguity can be reduced by a phenomenon of structural priming (e.g., Traxler & Pickering, 2005). What is still not clear is whether priming only helps comprehenders to recover from an initial misanalysis or it also helps to make a prediction of a correct analysis before encountering disambiguating information. We conducted two eye-tracking visual world experiments to investigate this issue with structurally ambiguous relative clause sentences such as Roujin-ga shinbun-wo yondeiru bijinesuman-ni hanashikaketa ('The old man talked to the businessman who was reading the newspaper'). The results showed that while listening to the structurally ambiguous part of a sentence, participants made a prediction of the same sentence structure as a prime structure. Importantly, the effect was observed both when the verb was repeated between prime and target and when it was not. Our study demonstrated that a past experience to a sentence structure not only influences listeners on the recovery from misanalysis but also on the probabilities of upcoming dispreferred structures.
2011-07-29