Electrophysiological and behavioral evidence of syntactic priming in sentence comprehension

Abstract

Event-related potentials and eye tracking were used to investigate the nature of priming effects in sentence comprehension. Participants read 2 sentences (a prime sentence and a target sentence), both of which had a difficult and ambiguous sentence structure. The prime and target sentences contained either the same verb or verbs that were very close in meaning. Priming effects were robust when the verb was repeated. In the event-related potential experiment, the amplitude of the P600 was reduced in target sentences that followed prime sentences with the same verb but not in prime sentences with a synonymous verb. In the eye-tracking experiment, total reading times on the disambiguating region were reduced when the targets followed prime sentences with the same verb but not when targets followed prime sentences with a synonymous verb. The fact that verb overlap greatly boosted priming effects in reduced relative sentences may indicate that verb argument structures play an important role in online parsing.