Konradt, Alina Vadimovna; (2020) Beyond Surface Constituency: Exploring the Nature of Syntactic Priming through Evidence from English- and Russian-speaking Adults and Children. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Syntactic priming is the phenomenon by which the comprehension or production of a given sentence is facilitated by the processing of another sentence with similar or identical syntax. I propose that syntactic priming taps into the abstract syntactic representation which incorporates the information on the predicate’s argument structure and thus defend the Argument Structure Priming Hypothesis. This stands in contrast to the widely accepted conceptualisation of syntactic priming, Constituent Structure Priming, where priming concerns mere linear constituent order (Bock & Loebell, 1990). I also argue against the idea of Patient Prominence Priming, where the utterance’s discourse function is assumed to play a role in priming (Vasilyeva & Waterfall, 2012). Seven production priming experiments were conducted with Russian and English adults and 4- to 7-year olds to investigate whether and to what extent these three conceptualisations of syntactic priming are empirically valid. The findings in both languages for both adults and children highlight the significance of argument structure for priming, supporting the Argument Structure Priming Hypothesis, while providing little evidence for Constituent Structure Priming or Patient Prominence Priming. I also explored the Argument Prominence Hierarchy hypothesis (Titov 2012). On this hypothesis the linear order of arguments in a sentence is governed by their relative interpretive status, which is defined by a number of features, animacy being one of them. My findings demonstrate that the participants were sensitive to the animacy distribution in the events they described, exactly as predicted. This allows me to attribute the data in the literature supporting the two alternative conceptualisations of syntactic priming, Constituent Structure Priming and Patient Prominence Priming, to asymmetric distribution of animacy in the experimental items participants described as part of a priming task. Finally, the striking similarity between the syntactic behaviour of adults and children in the present experiments, permits us to sustain the Continuity account of language acquisition.

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