2018 Sat Poster 6612

Saturday, November 3, 2018 | Poster Session II, Metcalf Small | 3:15pm

Implicit Learning and Surprisal Effects in a Structurally Biased Language: A Developmental Study
A. Kholodova, M. Peter, C. Rowland, S. Allen

Syntactic priming is the tendency to unconsciously reproduce a previously experienced sentence structure, irrespective of lexical information [1]. This effect is often investigated using the dative alternation, in which the same message can be expressed using either a prepositional object structure (PO, e.g., The girl gave the book to the boy) or a double object structure (DO, e.g., The girl gave the boy the book). However, the dative alternation has mostly been studied in languages like English and Dutch where the two dative structures are relatively balanced in use, and presumably also in strength of mental representations. Far less research has been investigated in languages where one structural option is strongly preferred. Studying priming in such languages allows us to see whether priming mechanisms function similarly when the strength of mental representation of the two structures is very different. This has important implications for processing theories.

Here we investigate priming in German, a language where the default structure is DO and where young children are hardly ever exposed to POs. We explored whether syntactic priming can enhance the dispreferred PO production in German-speaking children and adults. If so, this would support the Implicit Learning Account [2] according to which language input is processed via an error-based learning mechanism [3], and in which more surprising structures (i.e., less frequent structures like German PO) are predicted to result in more priming (surprisal effects [4]).

We designed a video description priming task for monolingual German speakers aged 3-4 years (N=42), 5-6 years (N=31), and adults (N=37) adapted from previous work with English-speaking children [5]. We used intransitive primes to assess baseline rates of PO/DO production, and then used PO and DO primes to assess the priming effect. The ditransitive primes and targets used either the same verb (SV) or a different verb (DV), in order to test whether children would show the lexical boost effect as previously shown for adults [6].

Results revealed a significant increase for all groups in PO production following a PO prime compared to both an intransitive prime (baseline) and a DO prime (DV condition) (Figure 1). This suggests that the strong language-specific bias for DO can be overridden by immediate exposure, resulting in implicit learning for all groups. Moreover, the large magnitude of the priming effect in younger children in the intransitive vs. PO prime condition is predicted by the Implicit Learning account, resulting from stronger surprisal effects due to weaker representations. In the SV condition (Figure 2), only adults showed a lexical boost effect (31%; p<.001). This finding is in line with some previous studies [5,7] but not with others [8,9]. Our results support two claims of the Implicit Learning Account: that the lexical boost effect stems from explicit memory retrieval (which is underdeveloped in children), and that the lexical boost and structural priming effects stem from different processing mechanisms.

Our study shows the impact of structural priming when mental representations are much weaker for one structure, providing valuable insights into strong prime surprisal and learning effects.

References

  1. Bock K. (1986). Syntactic persistence in language production. Cognitive Psychology 18: 355– 387.
  2. Bock K., & Griffin Z.M. (2000). The persistence of structural priming: Transient activation or implicit learning? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 129: 177–192.
  3. Chang , Dell G., & Bock J.K. (2006). Becoming syntactic. Psychological Review 113 (2): 34-272.
  4. Jeager T., & Snider N. (2007). Implicit Learning and syntactic persistence: Surprisal and cumulativity. University of Rochester Working Papers in the Language Sciences 3 (1): 26-44.
  5. Rowland F., Chang F., Ambridge B., Pine J.M., & Lieven E.V.M. (2012). The development of abstract syntax: Evidence from structural priming and the lexical boost. Cognition 125: 49-63.
  6. Pickering J., & Branigan H.J. (1998). The representation of verbs: Evidence from syntactic priming in language production. Journal of Memory and Language 39: 633-651.
  7. Peter , Chang F., Pine J.M., Blything R., & Rowland C.F. (2015). When and how do children develop knowledge of verb argument structure? Evidence from verb bias effects in a structural priming task. Journal of Memory and Language 81: 1-15
  8. Morris C. & C. Sheepers (2015). Syntactic priming and the lexical boost in preschool children. (Unpublished but available on Research Gate).
  9. Branigan P. & J.F. McLean (2016). What children learn from adults’ utterances: An ephemeral lexical boost and persistent syntactic priming in adult–child dialogue. Journal of Memory and Language 91: 141-15