Abstract

SEVILLA, YAMILA; JAICHENCO, VIRGINIA; WILSON, MAXIMILIANO  and  RAITER, ALEJANDRO. SYNTACTIC PRIMING IN SENTENCE PRODUCTION IN SPANISH: ABOUT THE SYNTACTIC REPRESENTATION OF VERB S. RLA [online]. 2008, vol.46, n.2, pp. 11-27. ISSN 0718-4883.  http://dx.doi.org/10.4067/S0718-48832008000200002.

We present the results of a syntactic priming experiment aimed at investigating the syntactic information represented in the lexical entries of verbs. By means of a written sentence completion task that manipulated the combinatory properties of a set of verbs (by selecting either a NP or a IP or a CP) we found that participants tended to use the previously experienced structures in the new sentences. This effect was found either when the prime sentences were the ones participants had produced before (Condition II) or when primes were previously read sentences (Condition I). This confirms previous findings (i.e. Bock, 2002; Bock et al. 2007) in the sense that priming takes place from comprehension to production as well. These experiments also showed that priming was sensitive to CP/IP distinction but not to constituents' internal structure. These findings enable us to infer that combinatory information (Pickering y Branigan, 1998) associated with lemma nodes of the verbs (Levelt, Roelofs y Meyer, 1999) is at phrasal level, and that it codifies the categorial nature of the XP selected by the verb.

Keywords : Psycholinguistics; syntactic priming; sentence production; verbs; combinatory properties.