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Structural priming in comprehension with RPVP
Poster Session A, Friday, September 12, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm, Field House
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Julia Cataldo1, Amilleah Rodriguez1, Liina Pylkkänen1; 1New York University
The neural representation of syntax remains debated (Friederici, 2011; Matchin and Hickok, 2020; Fedorenko et al., 2020; Matar et al., 2021). This study uses MEG and a structural priming paradigm to test whether syntactic structure persists as a mental representation after exposure to a grammatical expression. Structural priming effects are well-documented in language production (Mahowald et al., 2016) but are less consistently observed in comprehension (Tooley & Traxler, 2010), possibly due to the more passive nature of comprehension (van Lieburg et al., 2023). Here we explore another potential explanation for the asymmetry: the serial nature of sentence processing may lessen the synchronicity of the activation of a syntactic tree representation, and consequently its availability as a primed representation in a priming paradigm. This would happen because in serial presentation, more trees are likely to be considered by the parser, lessening the strength of the “right” tree as the prime representation. We hypothesize that removing serial presentation via the rapid parallel visual presentation (RPVP) method might lessen syntactic ambiguity, allowing a more robust syntactic representation to persist. Thus, under the priming paradigm, we predict that residual activation from a previously processed structure should help the recognition of the same syntactic structure in a subsequent sentence. However, if parallel presentation does not alter the fundamental nature of syntactic processing, it may not yield reliable syntactic priming in comprehension—only lexical priming, which we also manipulated. To test this, we eliminate the serial unfolding of language by employing RPVP (Wen et al., 2021; Snell & Grainger, 2017) in combination with structural priming. The two syntactic structures used were Det-Adj-Noun sequences such as ‘the green color’ and Det-Noun-Noun sequences such as ‘the color green.’ They were entered into a 2×2×2 factorial design manipulating Syntactic Structure (Same/Different), Lexical Overlap (Same/Different words between prime and target) and Compositionality (Phrase/List). Color lists such as ‘tan green black’ were used as noncombinatory controls. Participants are presented with two strings of words, a prime and a target, flashed onscreen for 300ms each, with an SOA of 800ms. Their task is to decide whether the strings are the same. Pure structural priming in the absence of lexical overlap should manifest as reduced activation for a target with a shared syntactic structure to the prime, when compared to a target that differs from the prime in both syntactic structure and lexical material. Alternatively, in the matching task, shared syntactic structure in the absence of lexical overlap could also manifest as an inhibitory effect, delaying no-responses and increasing neural signals. The list condition is used to assess whether effects of different syntactic structures simply reflect swapped orders of words. MEG data collection for this study is ongoing and will be completed by the time of the annual meeting.
Topic Areas: Syntax and Combinatorial Semantics,