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Time Pressure and Syntactic Priming Alexandra Cleland and Martin Pickering Syntactic priming is the tendency for speakers to reuse previously processed syntactic structure (e.g. Bock,1986; Pickering & Branigan, 1998, Hartsuiker & Kolk, 1998). As reusing structure means that speakers do not need to generate speech completely from scratch, it has been suggested that syntactic repetition benefits a speaker's fluency (e.g. Levelt & Kelter, 1982; Smith & Wheeldon, 2001). In support of this "effort reduction" hypothesis, it has been demonstrated that syntactically primed sentences have a shorter speech onset latency than unprimed sentences (e.g. Smith & Wheeldon, 2001; Corley & Scheepers, in press). With this in mind we report 2 experiments which examine the effect of time pressure on syntactic priming. Subjects were presented with sentence fragments on a computer screen and were prompted to read them aloud and complete them. The prime sentence fragments were designed to either prompt a prepositional object completion (e.g. The millionaire loans the painting to the gallery) or a double object completion (e.g. The millionaire loans the gallery the priceless painting). The length of time which the speaker had to produce their target completion was manipulated so that they either had a very short time to produce a sentence, or a comparatively long time. We examined whether the syntactic form of the target completion was affected by the syntactic form of the prime completion and whether the priming effect was affected by time pressure. There was a significant priming effect: 26% more target utterances were of the same structure as the prime than were of the alternative. There was a numerically larger priming effect when speakers were under time pressure versus when they were not (31% versus 21% priming across both experiments). However, this finding was only significant by subjects, and was not significant by items. Speakers produced significantly shorter responses when placed under time pressure, and a significantly greater proportion of their completions could not be classified as either a prepositional object or a double object (e.g. The doctor shows off). While reusing syntactic structure may facilitate fluency in production, it appears that, when under time pressure, speakers would rather produce a shorter utterance and have to regenerate sentence structure anew than reuse a longer structure, even if it may be quicker to retrieve. The results are discussed in terms of the "effort reduction" hypothesis, and also in terms of their implications for residual activation and implicit learning accounts of syntactic priming. References Bock, J. K. (1986). Syntactic persistence in language production. Cognitive
Psychology, 18, 355-387. |