Lexical Boost for Syntactic Priming in a Head-Final Language Is Bound to the Verb but not to Pre-Head Constituents in Japanese

概要

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Many previous studies demonstrated a so-called lexical boost effect for syntactic priming in English: The magnitude of priming tends to be greater when the verb is repeated between prime and target sentences (e.g., Pickering & Branigan, 1998). One possible reason for this effect is that comprehenders encounter the verb and its syntactic information before any of its constituents in head-initial languages. Thus, it is still not known whether or not a similar effect occurs for the repetition of the verb in head-final languages. Another interesting possibility is that since comprehenders compute certain syntactic dependencies before the verb was encountered (e.g., Kamide, Altmann, & Haywood, 2003), it is possible that the repetition of a pre-head constituent may boost a priming effect in these languages. The current study investigated the effect of lexical overlap for the verb (Experiment 1) and for the noun phrase following the subject (Experiment 2) with Japanese ditransitive sentences using a sentence completion task. The results showed that an effect of syntactic priming -found in both experiments, -was boosted only when the verb was repeated between the prime and target but not when the second noun phrase was repeated.
一般社団法人電子情報通信学会の論文
2013-07-27