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Priming ditransitive structures in comprehension

Manabu Arai

University of Edinburgh

Roger P.G. van Gompel

University of Dundee

Christoph Scheepers

University of Glasgow

Address correspondence to:

Manabu Arai

Psychology

School of Philosophy Psychology and Language Sciences

University of Edinburgh

7 George Square

Edinburgh EH8 9JZ

Tel: +44 131 650 3410

Fax: +44 131 650 3461

Email: manabu.arai@ed.ac.uk

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Abstract

Many studies have shown evidence for syntactic priming during language production (e.g.,

Bock, 1986). It is often assumed that comprehension and production share similar

mechanisms and that priming also occurs during comprehension (e.g., Pickering & Garrod,

2004). Research investigating priming during comprehension (e.g., Branigan, Pickering, &

McLean, 2005; Scheepers & Crocker, 2004) has mainly focused on syntactic ambiguities that

are very different from the meaning-equivalent structures used in production research. In two

experiments, we investigated whether priming during comprehension occurs in ditransitive

sentences similar to those used in production research. When the verb was repeated between

prime and target, we observed a priming effect similar to that in production. However, we

observed no evidence for priming when the verbs were different. Thus, priming during

comprehension occurs for very similar structures as priming during production, but in

contrast to production, the priming effect is completely lexically dependent.

Keywords

Language comprehension, Sentence processing, Syntactic priming, Anticipatory eye

movements

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It is generally assumed that recent exposure to a syntactic structure facilitates subsequent

production and comprehension processes. Evidence that recent exposure to syntactic

structures affects subsequent production comes from studies showing evidence for syntactic

priming, the phenomenon that the processing of a syntactic structure facilitates the

subsequent processing of the same structure (e.g., Bock, 1986, 1989; Bock & Loebell, 1990;

Bock, Loebell & Morey, 1992; Pickering & Branigan, 1998). By contrast, it is much less

clear whether syntactic priming affects comprehension processes in a similar way. Therefore,

the question we address in the current paper is whether syntactic priming in comprehension

occurs for similar structures as those tested in production research.

One of the first studies showing evidence for syntactic priming during production was

reported in a seminal paper by Bock (1986). Participants in her study produced ditransitive

prime sentences that either had a prepositional object dative (PO) or double object dative

structure (DO).

(1a) The lifeguard tossed the struggling child a rope. (DO structure)

(1b) The lifeguard tossed a rope to the struggling child. (PO structure)

They were followed by a semantically unrelated target picture that could be described either

with a PO (e.g., The man is reading a book to the boy) or DO structure (e.g., The man is

reading the boy a book). The results showed that participants tended to describe the picture

using the same syntactic structure as in the prime sentence. That is, after producing a PO

prime (1b), they were more likely to describe a following picture using a PO structure than a

DO structure, and likewise, after hearing a DO prime (1a), they were more likely to describe

the picture using a DO structure than a PO structure. Subsequent experiments have suggested

that sentence priming effects have a truly syntactic component and are not merely caused by

non-syntactic factors. For example, Bock (1989) observed that priming occurred regardless

of whether function words (e.g., to) were the same in prime and target. She also showed that

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the priming effect was not due to prosodic similarities between prime and target. Bock and

Loebell (1990) showed that sentences with the same structure as dative POs but with different

semantic roles (e.g., The wealthy widow drove her Mercedes to the church) primed the

production of PO structures to the same extent as dative POs, suggesting that the priming

effect is syntactic rather than semantic in nature. Hartsuiker and Westenberg (2000) observed

priming for different orderings of the past participle and auxiliary in Dutch (e.g., was stolen

vs. stolen was). These structures do not differ in their conceptual or information structures,

so these results suggest that sentence priming effects are not merely due to repetition of

conceptual or information structure. Finally, Pickering and Branigan (1998) found that

priming was unaffected by repetition of the verb's aspect, tense, or number in ditransitive

structures such as (1). In sum, there is strong evidence for a syntactic component to sentence

priming effects. In addition, there may also be other factors that play a role. For example,

recent production experiments have provided evidence for semantic effects (e.g., Chang,

Bock, & Goldberg, 2003; Cleland & Pickering, 2003; Griffin & Weinstein-Tull, 2003).

Pickering and Branigan (1998; Branigan, Pickering, & Cleland, 2000) showed that

repetition of the verb between prime and target is one important factor affecting syntactic

priming. Using ditransitive structures such as (1), they showed that priming occurred when

the verb in the prime and target was different, but it was much larger when the verb was the

same. They explained these results with a model that assumes that syntactic structures are

represented at a lexical level. In their model, each verb has separate connections to

combinatorial nodes, which represent syntactic structures. When a particular verb occurs

with, say, the PO structure in the prime, both the activation of the PO combinatorial node and

the strength of the connection between the verb and the PO node are increased. Both result in

priming when the verb in the prime and target are the same, so strong priming should occur.

In contrast, when the verb in the target is different from the prime verb, the increased verb-

PO connection strength does not have any effect because it does not apply to the target verb,

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so only the activation of the PO node results in priming. Hence, consistent with Pickering

and Branigan's (1998) results, the priming effect should be weaker.

It has also been shown that sentence production is affected by the comprehension of a

preceding sentence, suggesting that sentence production and comprehension share common

processing mechanisms or representations. Branigan et al. (2000) found that in dialogue,

participants tended to repeat syntactic structures that were produced by their interlocutor (See

also Cleland & Pickering, 2003). Drawing on this and other research, Pickering and Garrod

(2004) proposed a model that assumes that interlocutors interactively align their utterances at

all levels of representation in both production and comprehension. This predicts that

syntactic priming should occur in comprehension as well as in production and suggests that

the priming effects should be affected by similar factors.

Most sentence comprehension theories do not make precise predictions about how

exposure to a prime sentence should affect subsequent processing of the next sentence.

However, nearly all theories assume that frequent exposure to a particular syntactic structure

should have long-term effects resulting in facilitation of that structure during subsequent

processing. This assumption explains why people find it easier to process syntactic structures

that are highly frequent than structures that are infrequent (e.g., Clifton, Frazier, & Connine,

1984; Garnsey, Pearlmutter, Myers, & Lotocky, 1997; Mitchell & Holmes, 1985; Trueswell,

1996; Trueswell, Tanenhaus, & Kello, 1993). Although it is a controversial issue whether

people immediately use syntactic frequency information during sentence processing (e.g.,

MacDonald, Pearlmutter & Seidenberg, 1994; Trueswell et al., 1993) or whether its use is

delayed (e.g., Ferreira & Henderson, 1990; Frazier, 1995), nearly all sentence processing

theories share the assumption that prior exposure to syntactic structures should have an effect

at some stage during sentence processing. However, as highlighted by Mitchell, Cuetos,

Corley, and Brysbaert (1995), an important question concerns the type of syntactic frequency

information that people use. Mitchell et al. (1995) proposed that the processor only uses

coarse-grained frequency information, that is, it does not take into account the frequency with

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which syntactic structures co-occur with specific words. In contrast, constraint-based

lexicalist theories claim that the sentence processor employs syntactic frequency information

that is associated with individual lexical items (e.g., Garnsey et al., 1997; Juliano &

Tanenhaus, 1994; MacDonald et al., 1994; Trueswell et al., 1993). In fact, most of these

models assume that both lexically specific and lexically independent (coarse-grained)

frequency information affect sentence processing (e.g., Juliano & Tanenhaus, 1994; McRae,

Spivey-Knowlton, & Tanenhaus, 1998; Tabor, Juliano, & Tanenhaus, 1997).

It is currently unclear to what extent long-term exposure and recent exposure in the

previous sentence are similar, but what is clear is that syntactic priming effects during

comprehension may also be either lexically specific or lexically independent in origin. The

current study will investigate to what extent syntactic priming in comprehension is lexical in

nature. This issue is highly relevant for the comparison between syntactic priming in

comprehension and production, because, as demonstrated by Pickering and Branigan (1998),

syntactic priming in production is partly lexically independent (resulting in priming when the

verb in prime and target is not repeated) and partly lexically specific (resulting in stronger

priming with repeated verbs). In order to facilitate the comparison between syntactic priming

during production and comprehension, we employed ditransitive structures such as in (1),

which are similar to those used by Pickering and Branigan (1998) and many other studies

showing evidence for syntactic priming during production (e.g., Bock, 1986, 1989; Bock &

Griffin, 2000; Bock & Loebell, 1990; Branigan et al., 2000; Branigan, Pickering, Stewart, &

McLean, 2000; Branigan, Pickering, & Cleland, 1999; Corley & Scheepers, 2002; Pickering,

Branigan, & McLean, 2002; Potter & Lombardi, 1998).

Although syntactic priming during comprehension has received much less attention

than syntactic priming during production, a few studies have investigated whether recent

exposure affects subsequent comprehension of the same structure. Mehler and Carey (1967)

found that participants perceived sentences masked by white noise significantly better if they

were preceded by sets of sentences with a similar structure. For example, a sentence such as

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They are describing events was perceived better following sentences such as They are

forecasting cyclones than sentences such as They are recurring mistakes. Likewise, Mehler

and Carey (1968) and Carey, Mehler, and Bever (1970) observed that participants'

performance on a sentence-picture matching task was affected by prior exposure to similar

sentences. However, in all these studies, a large number of prime sentences preceded the

target trial, so it is likely that participants were aware of similarities between the primes and

targets and that the results were due to strategic processes. Similarly, participants may have

been aware of similarities between the sentences in a more recent study by Noppeney and

Price (2004), who conducted a self-paced reading and fMRI experiment. Their materials

consisted of temporarily ambiguous reduced relative sentences such as The child left by his

parents played table football, where the child left can temporarily be analysed as a main

clause (e.g., the child left his parents) and temporarily ambiguous intransitive structures such

as After the headmaster had left the school deteriorated rapidly, where After the headmaster

had left the school can temporarily be analysed as a transitive clause. Participants also

received blocks of sentences that were either syntactically similar or dissimilar. Noppeney

and Price observed that reading times were faster and brain activation was lower for blocks of

sentences with syntactically similar structures. However, it is possible that this is due to

strategic processes that occurred when participants discovered that the sentences in a block

were syntactically similar.

Branigan, Pickering, and McLean (2005) used a sentence-picture matching task in

which target trials were preceded by a single prime sentence. In one of their experiments,

participants first read globally ambiguous sentences such as (2).

(2) The policeman prodding the doctor with the gun.

The sentences were ambiguous in that the PP with the gun could be interpreted either as

modifying the verb prod (VP attachment) or as modifying the noun phrase the doctor (NP

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attachment). Participants next saw two pictures and were asked to choose the picture that

they thought matched the prime sentence. In the prime trials, only one of the two pictures

correctly matched the sentence, so the picture disambiguated the sentence. In contrast, in the

target trials immediately following the prime trials, one of the pictures matched the VP

attachment interpretation and the other the NP attachment interpretation. When the verb was

repeated in prime and target, participants were more likely to choose the picture that matched

the same interpretation as that in the prime trials, but there was no significant priming effect

when the verb was not repeated.

However, the priming effect may have been caused by perceptual similarities between

the pictures in the prime and the target. The VP attachment pictures always showed an action

being performed with an instrument (e.g., prodding with a gun) whereas the NP attachment

pictures always showed an action without the instrument (e.g., prodding with a finger).

Hence, the observed effect may not be linguistic. Furthermore, the sentence-picture matching

task may be sensitive to strategic effects that are involved in decision processes, so it may not

inform us about online sentence processing.

Pickering and Traxler (2004) and Traxler and Pickering (2005) measured eye

movements during reading to investigate syntactic priming. They employed sentences

containing temporarily ambiguous reduced relatives such as in (3).

(3) The defendant examined by the lawyer turned out to be unreliable.

When the relative clause verb (examined) stayed the same between the prime and target,

reduced relative sentences such as (3) were read faster when they were preceded by a

sentence that was disambiguated towards the reduced relative interpretation than when they

were preceded by a sentence disambiguated towards the main clause analysis. Furthermore,

unreduced relative sentences (containing who was preceding the relative clause verb) and

passive sentences also primed reduced relatives. However, no priming effects occurred when

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the verb in the prime and target was different, suggesting that that priming in comprehension

may be entirely dependent on verb repetition.

In an ERP study, Ledoux, Traxler, and Swaab (2006) tested similar reduced relative

materials and used the same verb in prime and target. Interestingly, they observed that the

positive shift in the ERP wave signal (P600) was higher when a reduced relative was

preceded by a main clause than when it was preceded by another reduced relative. Assuming

that the P600 component reflects syntactic processing (e.g., Hagoort, Brown, & Groothusen,

1993; Osterhout & Holcomb, 1992), this suggests that the priming effects in reduced relatives

are syntactic rather than semantic in nature.

In all the above studies, the structures that were tested were very different from those

used in production studies, so it is difficult to draw comparisons of syntactic priming effects

in production and comprehension. Furthermore, the prime sentences in the different

conditions differed in syntax as well as in semantics. Except for the ERP study by Ledoux et

al. (2006), where the P600 component suggests that the priming effect is syntactic, the effects

in the other studies may be due to semantic rather than syntactic properties of the primes.

Frazier, Taft, Roeper, Clifton, and Ehrlich (1984) did use sentences that were

equivalent in meaning. They investigated parallelism effects for a variety of different

structures, including active and passive sentences that have been tested in production studies

of syntactic priming (e.g., Bock, 1986, 1989; Bock & Loebell, 1990). They observed that

reading times for the second clause in sentences consisting of two active clausal conjuncts

(4a) were faster than in sentences consisting of a passive and active conjunct (4b).

(4a) The tall gangster hit John and the short thug hit Sam.

(4b) John was hit by the tall gangster and the short thug hit Sam.

This may suggest that the second conjunct was syntactically primed by the first. However,

Frazier, Munn, and Clifton (2000) observed that parallelism effects occurred with conjoined

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phrases such as a strange man and a tall woman in Hilda noticed a strange man and a tall

woman when she entered the house, but not with similar non-conjoined phrases as in a

strange man noticed a tall woman yesterday at Judi’s, suggesting that parallelism effects are

not due to genuine syntactic priming. Frazier et al. suggested that parallelism effects in

conjoined phrases may occur because the structure of two conjoined phrases is often the same,

so the first phrase predicts the structure of the second phrase. By contrast, in non-conjoined

phrases, the structure of the first phrase does not reliably predict the structure of the second.

In addition, we believe that parallelism effects may also be due to stylistic preferences for

parallel conjoined structures.

Furthermore, in many of Frazier et al.’s (1984) materials, lexical items and semantic

content were repeated across the two conjuncts, so it is unclear whether their parallelism

effects occur in the absence of such repetition. Branigan (1995) showed no evidence for

parallelism effects in active/passive structures and PO/DO structures with materials that did

not have lexical and semantic repetitions, whereas there were significant parallelism effects

for temporarily ambiguous sentences such as reduced relatives.

More recently, Luka and Barsalou (2005) also investigated priming from meaning-

equivalent sentences. In their grammaticality acceptability experiment, they tested

ditransitive PO/DO sentences such as (5) as part of a larger set of sentence structures.

(5a) Ramarez passed Santiago the ball.

(5b) Ramarez passed the ball to Santiago.

They found that participants judged a sentence as more acceptable if it was preceded by sets

of structurally similar prime sentences. However, they did not separately analyse priming

effects for the different types of sentence structures they used, so it is not possible to ascertain

whether syntactic priming occurred for PO/DO structures such as (5). Furthermore,

acceptability judgements reflect conscious decisions that are likely to be affected by

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relatively late and strategic processes and they encourage participants to pay particular

attention to structural features of sentences. Hence, it is unclear what the implications for

normal online sentence processing are.

Scheepers and Crocker (2004) used the visual-world eye-movement paradigm to

investigate syntactic priming, a method known to be highly sensitive to moment-to-moment

sentence processing effects (e.g., Altmann & Kamide, 1999; Eberhard, Spivey-Knowlton,

Sedivy, & Tanenhaus, 1995; Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard, & Sedivy, 1995;

Trueswell, Sekerina, Hill, & Logrip, 1999). In Scheepers and Crocker's experiment,

participants first read aloud written German prime sentences such as (6a) or (6b). The

constituent order in the prime sentences was either subject-verb-object (SVO, 6a), which is

the canonical order in German, or object-verb-subject (OVS, 6b).

(6a) Der Regisseur lobte insbesondere den Produzenten.

The director [nom] commended in particular the producer [acc].

(6b) Den Regisseur lobte insbesondere der Produzent.

The director [acc] commended in particular the producer [nom].

(7a) Die Krankenschwester föhnt offensichtlich den Priester.

The nurse [ambig.] blow-dries apparently the priest [acc].

(7b) Die Krankenschwester schubst offensichtlich der Sportler.

The nurse [ambig.] pushes apparently the sportsman [nom].

The prime sentences (6) were unambiguous by virtue of the case marking on the first article

(der/den). Participants next listened to an auditorily presented target sentence such as (7a) or

(7b), which was temporarily ambiguous, because case marking on the first article (die)

permitted both a subject and object reading of the first NP. At the same time, participants

saw a picture showing two events. In one of the events, the first NP was an agent and the

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second a patient (e.g., the nurse blow drying a priest), so this event was consistent with a

subject interpretation of the first NP (and therefore with the SVO analysis). In the other

event, the first NP was a patient and the second an agent (e.g., the nurse being pushed by a

sportsman), consistent with an object interpretation of the first NP.

Scheepers and Crocker observed that the constituent order in the prime affected

participants' anticipatory eye movements to the second noun (priest/sportsman) while they

listened to the case ambiguous first NP (e.g., die Krankenschwester). After SVO primes,

participants made more looks to the character that was depicted as being a patient (e.g., the

priest) than to the character depicted as an agent (e.g., the sportsman), whereas it was the

other way around after OVS primes. Hence, participants anticipated the second noun on the

basis of the structure of the prime in combination with the information in the visual scene.

The current study also used the visual-world eye-movement paradigm to investigate

syntactic priming. In order to gain insight into similarities between syntactic priming in

comprehension and production, we tested ditransitive PO/DO structures that have previously

been used to study sentence production (e.g., Bock, 1986, 1989; Pickering & Branigan,

1998). Furthermore, unlike the materials in many previous studies investigating syntactic

priming in comprehension, the two structural variants of the ditransitive construction (PO or

DO) have essentially the same meaning, so any observed priming effects must be due to the

structure (i.e. constituent order) rather than due to the semantics of the primes.

Participants first read a PO or DO prime sentence such as (8) aloud.

(8a) The assassin will send the dictator the parcel.

(8b) The assassin will send the parcel to the dictator.

(9a) The pirate will send the princess the necklace.

(9b) The pirate will send the necklace to the princess.

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Next, they listened to a PO or DO target structure such as (9) while their eye movements to a

visual scene containing a picture of the agent (the pirate), recipient (the princess) and theme

(the necklace) in the sentence were monitored. Using the visual-world paradigm, Altmann

and Kamide (1999) showed that people anticipate upcoming linguistic information. In their

study, participants listened to sentences such as the boy will eat the cake while they saw a

visual scene containing a boy, a cake, and a number of distractor objects. As soon as

participants heard the verb eat, they tended to look at the cake, suggesting that they

anticipated properties of the arguments following the verb. Subsequent experiments

(Kamide, Altmann, & Haywood, 2003; Kamide, Scheepers, & Altmann, 2003) have shown

that combinatorial semantic information provided by two words in the sentence and case

marking in languages such as German and Japanese also influence anticipatory eye

movements.

On the basis of these earlier findings, we predict that when participants hear the verb

and anticipate a recipient role immediately following it, they should look more often and

longer at the recipient picture than when they anticipate a theme role. Similarly, they should

look more often and longer at the theme picture if they anticipate a theme role immediately

following the verb than if they anticipate a recipient role. Hence, if syntactic priming occurs

and influences anticipatory eye movements, we expect that participants will look more often

and longer at recipient pictures following DO primes than following PO primes, and look

more often and longer at theme pictures following PO primes than following DO primes.

Apart from demonstrating that syntactic priming occurs during comprehension with

similar structures to those used in production studies, such results would also have important

implications regarding the nature of the anticipations that people make. It is currently unclear

whether anticipations are purely semantic or include a more structural component. In the

studies by Altmann, Kamide, and colleagues, participants may have anticipated semantic

properties of all possible arguments following the verb without regard to the order in which

the arguments should appear (a structural component). If the priming manipulation in our

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study affects anticipatory eye movements, this would suggest that participants anticipate

information related to the order of the arguments following the verb. Such a finding would

be difficult to reconcile with models that assume that the processor does not project any

structure until it encounters the noun phrase following the verb (e.g., Frazier, 1987). Instead,

it would support the view that the processor projects syntactic information at the verb (e.g.,

Gorrell, 1995; MacDonald et al., 1994; Pritchett, 1992).

This article reports two experiments. In Experiment 1, we investigated whether

syntactic priming occurs when the verb in the prime and target sentence is the same, as in (8-

9). In Experiment 2, the verb in the prime and target was different. Comparison of the

results from the two experiments enabled us to test whether syntactic priming in ditransitive

sentences during comprehension is lexically specific or independent. We will return to this

issue in Experiment 2.

Experiment 1

Experiment 1 investigated syntactic priming in comprehension in PO/DO structures that had

the same verb in prime and target.

Method

Participants. Thirty-two participants from the University of Dundee student community

were recruited to take part in the experiment. All were native speakers of British English

with normal or corrected-to-normal vision. They received either course credit or £4.00 in

exchange for their participation.

Materials. Thirty-two items were constructed, each consisting of two stimuli: a written

sentence serving as the prime, and a spoken sentence combined with a semi-realistic scene

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serving as the target. Prime sentences were either of the double object form (DO, e.g., 8a) or

of the alternative prepositional object form (PO, e.g., 8b). The two types of prime sentences

differed in the syntactic structure of the verb phrase (VP). In DO sentences, the verb was

followed by two noun phrases (NPs): an indirect object denoting the recipient and a direct

object referring to the theme. In PO sentences, the verb was followed by a direct object NP

denoting the theme and a prepositional phrase (PP) denoting the recipient.

The spoken target sentences were also either in the DO (9a) or PO (9b) form, like the

written prime sentences they were paired with. Target sentences were recorded on a

MiniDisk from a male native speaker of Scottish English who was instructed to use a neutral

intonation. The recordings were saved as 16 KHz mono wave-files for later editing and

presentation. The form of the target sentences was manipulated orthogonally to the form of

the prime sentences, making it impossible to predict the eventual target structure from the

type of prime preceding it. Except for the verb, none of the content words was repeated

between prime and target, and the prime and target sentence could not plausibly be

interpreted as part of the same discourse. Finally, in all of our target sentences, both referent

nouns following the verb started with a consonant (pronunciation of the postverbal

determiner the was therefore not indicative of the following noun).

The 32 sets of prime and target sentences were generated from a list of 12 ditransitive

verbs (see Appendix). These were taken from previous studies on language production and

were known to support PO and DO constructions about equally well.

Each target sentence was combined with a semi-realistic visual scene, created from

commercially available clipart images. They were saved as 16-bit colour bitmaps in

1024×768 pixels resolution. Each picture contained three entities, each of which

corresponded to one of the thematic roles (agent, recipient, and theme) in the corresponding

ditransitive target sentence. Figure 1 provides an example.

[Insert Figure 1 here]

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The pictured entities were designed to be easily recognisable and had no obvious semantic

relation to one another. The three entities in each picture were arranged in a ‘triangular’

fashion: one entity was placed on the left, one entity in the middle (above or below centre),

and one entity on the right of the display. Across items, we ensured that agent, theme, and

recipient entities appeared equally often in each of the three positions, thereby

counterbalancing potential scanning preferences. Pictures always stayed the same across

experimental conditions – only the linguistic materials (prime and target sentences) varied

according to the experimental design.1

Design and Procedure. We employed essentially the same methodology as in Scheepers and

Crocker (2004), combining reading of the prime sentences with a visual-world paradigm in

the target trials. For each picture (e.g., Figure 1), each type of prime (8a vs. 8b) was

combined with each type of target sentence (9a vs. 9b), resulting in a 2 × 2 repeated measures

design. The experiment contained 32 experimental items, each having four conditions. We

constructed four lists comprising eight items from each condition, with exactly one version of

each item appearing in each list. Additionally, 35 written sentences and 39 visual scenes plus

auditory sentences were included as fillers in each list. Filler sentences were syntactically

and semantically unrelated to the ditransitive structures under investigation and consisted of

intransitives, passives, or copula-verb constructions. Consistent with the experimental target

items, the visual-world fillers employed pictures composed of three entities in a triangular

arrangement. However, in the visual-world fillers, it was often the case that the auditory

sentence did not refer to all the entities in the picture (e.g., Cleopatra’s favourite food is ice-

cream presented in combination with a picture showing Cleopatra, a cone of ice-cream, and

Frankenstein’s monster).

The items of each list were presented in a fixed quasi-random order, subject to the

constraint that the critical prime-target pairs were preceded by at least two filler items

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randomly chosen from the full set of reading and visual-world fillers. This ensured that the

pairings of primes and targets were not transparent to the participant (i.e. it was not the case

that a reading trial was always followed by a visual-world trial, or vice versa). Four fillers

appeared at the beginning of each experimental session and three fillers followed a short

break half way through the experiment.

Participants were seated approximately 75 cm from a 21” colour monitor running at

120 Hz. Throughout the entire experiment, they wore an SR-Research EyeLink-II head-

mounted eye-tracking system with a sampling rate of 500 Hz and a spatial resolution of less

than 0.01°. Viewing was binocular, but only the participant’s dominant eye was tracked (the

right eye for about 70% of the participants, as determined by a simple parallax test prior to

the experiment). Head movements were not restricted. However, participants were

instructed to keep head movements to a minimum during the experiment. Auditory stimuli

were presented via a satellite-speaker and subwoofer system. The eye-tracker continuously

recorded onsets and offsets of fixations (as defined by acceleration and velocity thresholds)

together with corresponding spatial coordinates (in pixels).

The experiment began with the adjustment of the IR cameras of the tracker, a

procedure that took about one minute per participant. Next, a brief calibration procedure was

performed during which the participant had to look at a fixation cross in nine different

positions on the screen. This procedure, which took about 30 seconds, was repeated after a

short break half way through the experiment and whenever measurement accuracy appeared

insufficient (e.g., after changes in the participant’s posture). However, re-calibration was

never performed between a critical prime-target pair of trials.

A reading trial always started with the presentation of a fixation cross in the centre of

the screen. The participant had to fixate this cross such that an automatic drift-correction

could be performed. The experimenter pressed a button to trigger the presentation of the

written sentence. Participants were instructed to read the written sentences aloud, and to

press a button to proceed to the next trial when they had finished reading.

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A visual-world trial always appeared immediately after the previous trial had ended,

that is, without prior presentation of a fixation cross. This ensured that the time between a

prime trial and the following target trial was kept to a minimum (200 ms average ISI).

Participants were informed that the spoken sentences would always refer to the visual scenes

they were combined with, and that it was important to pay attention both to the visual scene

and the spoken sentence. Auditory sentence presentation always started after a 1000 ms

‘preview period’ following the onset of the picture. The picture stayed on the screen for

seven seconds (roughly one second longer than the end of the sentence), after which the next

trial was initiated.

Participants were told that that the experiment was concerned with both written and

auditory language comprehension and were unaware of the actual purpose of the study until

debriefing at the close of the experiment. To keep participants focused, six visual-world

fillers were followed by a written prompt indicating that participants had to verbally describe

the previous scene in their own words (participants typically responded by repeating the

auditory sentence they had heard before). Each experimental session took about 30 - 40

minutes to complete.

Data Analysis and Results

The spatial fixation coordinates from the original tracker output were mapped onto four

different areas in the visual scene: agent, recipient, theme, and background. This was done

using analysis bitmaps, which were graphically edited versions of the original presentation

bitmaps. The three objects (agent, recipient, and theme) in each picture were manually

defined, allowing an area of approximately 30 pixels around the contour of an object to be

coded as belonging to that object. Areas that were not associated with an object in this way

were coded as background. Our analysis software used these areas to identify whether

participants fixated on the picture of the recipient, theme, agent, or background. The same

19

software also pooled extremely short fixations (with a duration of less than 80 ms) with

immediately preceding or following fixations if those fixations lay within 0.5 degrees of

visual angle (ca. 12 pixels) from the short fixations (otherwise short fixations were eliminated

from analyses). The rationale behind this procedure was that such short fixations often result

from false saccade planning and are unlikely to reflect visual information processing (e.g.

Rayner & Pollatsek, 1989).

To enable synchronisation of eye movements with corresponding events in the

auditory sentences, the onset of the main verb, the postverbal determiner, and the first

postverbal noun in each target sentence were hand-coded in millisecond-resolution using

professional sound editing software. On average, the onset of the main verb occurred 2364

ms (DO targets) and 2338 ms (PO targets) after picture onset. The difference was not

significant (t (31) = 1.22, p = .23) according to a within-items t-test. The onset of the

postverbal determiner occurred 3328 ms (DO targets) and 3312 ms (PO targets) after picture

onset (t (31) = .60, p = .55), and for the first postverbal noun, the figures were 3479 ms (DO

targets) vs. 3462 ms (PO targets); again, the difference was not significant (t (31) = .65, p =

.52).

Of particular interest in all our analyses were fixations on the recipient and theme

objects in the target trials following the onset of the verb. Assuming that participants are able

to anticipate the ordering of the postverbal arguments at the verb and that this is reflected in

anticipatory eye movements, we expected that anticipatory looks to the recipient object

before the presentation of the first postverbal noun would indicate that perceivers are

expecting a DO construction to follow (a recipient NP immediately follows the verb in this

structure); conversely, anticipatory looks to the theme object would indicate that listeners are

expecting a PO construction (where a theme NP immediately follows the verb).

Consequently, if perceivers are primed by previous exposure to one of the two constructions,

we would expect that after having read a DO prime, participants should deploy more visual

attention to the recipient rather than the theme object when they hear the verb in the target

20

trial; after having read a PO prime, however, they should be more likely to focus attention on

the theme rather than the recipient object when hearing the verb.

First-Gaze Durations. In the first set of analyses, we focused on average first-gaze durations

to the recipient and theme objects. Following standard definitions, a gaze was defined as the

accumulation of all consecutive fixations on a picture object until another object (or the

background) was fixated. We analysed average gaze durations that started between the onset

of the verb and the onset of the postverbal determiner (gazes that were initiated before the

verb or after the onset of the postverbal determiner were ignored). Moreover, we only

included first gazes initiated between the onset of the verb and the postverbal determiner.

That is, if people fixated on, for example, the recipient, the theme and the recipient (in that

order) after the onset of the verb, we only analysed the very first gaze on the recipient, while

discarding the gaze on the theme and the second gaze on the recipient.

Table 1 shows the mean first-gaze durations on the recipient object and the theme

object separately for each prime condition. Note that we collapsed across target structure

(DO vs. PO), because both types of target sentences were identical up to the onset of the

postverbal noun. Indeed, there were no main effects or interactions involving target structure

(Fs < 1) in the first-gaze durations, justifying our approach of simply collapsing across levels

of this variable.

[Insert Table 1 here]

Data analyses were conducted using mixed-design ANOVAs including prime type

(DO vs. PO) and picture object (recipient vs. theme) as within-participants (F1) and within-

items (F2) variables; the four-level variable participant/item list was included as an additional

between-participants or -items variable in order to eliminate random variance between groups

(Pollatsek & Well, 1995). The analyses revealed no main effects of either prime type (Fs <

21

1) or picture object (Fs < 1). However, the interaction between the two variables was

significant (F1 (1, 28) = 11.92, p < .01; F2 (1, 28) = 6.00, p < .05), indicating a priming

effect. Simple effect comparisons indicated that first gazes on recipient objects were longer

after DO than PO primes, although this effect was marginal by participants (F1 (1, 28) = 3.43,

p = .08; F2 (1, 28) = 5.35, p < .05). Conversely, first gazes on theme objects were longer

after PO than DO primes, although this effect was not significant by items (F1 (1, 28) =

10.87, p < .01; F2 (1, 28) = 1.43, p = .24). The simple effects suggest that priming occurred

for both PO and DO targets, but they did not reach standard levels of significance by both

participants and items because the priming effect on each target separately was smaller than

the overall priming effect. Most crucially, given the significant interaction, we conclude that

durations of first gazes launched between verb and postverbal determiner onset provided

evidence for priming.

Log gaze probability ratios. In addition to first-gaze durations, we analysed gaze

probabilities per picture object over time. Because proportions of looks to different picture

objects are not linearly independent of one another (more looks to object A imply fewer looks

to object B, and vice versa), we did not include picture object as a variable in the ANOVAs.

Instead, we defined an analysis measure that expresses the strength of the visual bias towards

the recipient object relative to the theme object in terms of a log-ratio:

ln(P(recipient)/P(theme)), where P(recipient) refers to the likelihood of gaze on the recipient

object, and P(theme) the likelihood of a gaze on the theme object. The measure yields a score

of zero if both picture objects are inspected equally frequently (e.g., ln(0.2/0.2) = ln(1) = 0); a

positive score means that there are more looks to the recipient than the theme object (for

instance, a 3:2 advantage for the recipient object yields ln(0.3/0.2) = ln(1.5) = 0.405), and a

negative score implies that there are more looks to the theme than the recipient object (e.g., a

3:2 advantage for the theme object translates into ln(0.2/0.3) = ln(0.667) = −0.405). Thus, the

measure is symmetrical around zero. Its absolute score reflects the magnitude, while its sign

22

expresses the direction of the visual bias. Another advantage of log-ratios over standard

probabilities is that they yield data distributions that are more suitable for parametric testing

(standard probabilities often imply a violation of the homogeneity of variance assumption

because they can only take values between 0 and 1; log-ratios, by contrast, can take values

between minus infinite and plus infinite). Note that error term dfs in the log-ratio analyses

varied due to case-wise exclusion of participants or items that yielded zero gaze probabilities

on one or the other picture object during the relevant time window (the log of zero is not

defined, as is division by zero)2.

Analyses relative to verb onset. First, we conducted analyses of the log gaze

probability ratios relative to the onset of the verb. Starting from the verb onset in each

individual target sentence, we divided the gaze record into time slices of 20 ms each. Figure

2 plots the mean log gaze probability ratios (as defined above) over 75 of these time slices

from the onset of the main verb, spanning a period of 1500 ms. For inference-statistical

analysis, these 20 ms time slices were aggregated into larger time windows. That is, we

divided the 1500-ms time window following the onset of the main verb into five 300-ms bins

and then calculated the log gaze probability ratio for each bin.

[Insert Figure 2 here]

We conducted analyses of the logprobability ratio data within each 300 ms time window

following the onset of the verb using mixed-design ANOVAs including prime type as within-

participants (F1) and -items (F2) variables, and participant/item list as a between-participants

and -items variable. Both in the analyses and in Figure 2, we collapsed across the variable

target structure (PO vs. DO) because our analyses revealed no effect of this variable in the

first 1500 ms after the verb onset (Fs < 1).

Within 0-300 ms from the verb onset, Figure 2 shows a clear positive trend in the log-

ratio data, indicating an overall bias towards the recipient object in this time window. This

23

bias was confirmed by the intercept estimate in the ANOVA, which differed reliably from

zero (F1 (1, 26) = 10.88, p < .01; F2 (1, 27) = 4.36, p < .05)3. This bias may be due to a

preference for animate objects (recipients were always animate while theme objects were

always inanimate) or due to differences in visual saliency or size between the recipient and

theme picture objects. There was no effect of prime type during the 0-300 ms time window

(Fs < 1), which is unsurprising given that this time window is too early for participants to

process the verb.

In the following 300-600 ms time window, we found the same overall recipient bias

in the intercept statistics (F1 (1, 27) = 10.72, p < .01; F2 (1, 28) = 7.70, p = .01), again

suggesting a preference for animate objects. The effect of prime type was not significant

during this time window (F1 < 1; F2 (1, 28) = 2.31, p = .14).

The 600-900 ms time window after verb onset revealed no overall bias towards one or

the other picture object (Fs < 1 for the intercept). Instead, there was a significant effect of

prime type (F1 (1, 28) = 4.42, p < .05; F2 (1, 28) = 5.64, p < .05), indicating that participants’

looks to the recipient and theme were affected by whether they had just read a PO or DO

sentence aloud.

Analyses for the 900-1200 ms time window after verb onset also showed no overall

visual bias (Fs < 1 for the intercept), but again a clear effect of prime type (F1 (1, 28) = 8.29,

p <.01; F2 (1, 28) = 7.65, p = .01).

Finally, the 1200-1500 ms time window revealed the same pattern of results: no

overall preference for one or the other picture object (intercept statistics: F1 (1, 28) = 1.36, p

= .25; F2 (1, 28) = 1.68, p = .21) but a significant effect of prime type (F1 (1, 28) = 9.73, p <

.01; F2 (1, 28) = 10.36, p < .01).

Analyses relative to the first postverbal noun onset. The analyses relative to the first

postverbal noun onset were conducted in the same way as the analyses relative to the verb

onset, except that we included the variable target structure (PO vs. DO) as a within

participants and items variable. The first postverbal noun was either the recipient or theme,

24

so we expected that hearing this noun would affect the proportion of looks to the recipient

and theme objects. Furthermore, we only analysed 1200 ms following the onset of the first

postverbal noun, because there were too few gazes on either recipient or theme after this

point in time.

[Insert Figure 3 here]

Figure 3 shows the mean log gaze probability ratios relative to the onset of the first

postverbal noun. Within 0-300 ms from the postverbal noun onset, we observed a main

effect of prime type by participants but not by items (F1 (1, 26) = 10.79, p < .01; F2 (1, 25) =

1.98, p = .17), suggesting that the prime structure affected the proportion of looks to the

recipient and theme. There was no bias for either the recipient or theme (intercept statistics:

Fs < 1), no effect of target type (Fs < 1) and no interaction between prime and target (Fs < 1).

In the following 300-600 ms time window, we also observed a main effect of prime

type (F1 (1, 27) = 5.50, p < .05; F2 (1, 27) = 7.76, p = .01), again indicating a priming effect.

The main effect of target type was significant by items but marginal by participants (F1 (1,

27) = 3.82, p = .06; F2 (1, 27) = 6.55, p < .05). This suggests that participants looked more at

recipient objects (relative to theme objects) when hearing the recipient noun (DO target

sentence) than when hearing the theme noun (PO target sentence). There was no interaction

between prime and target type (Fs < 1) nor were the intercept statistics significant (F1 (1, 27)

= 2.25, p = .15; F2 (1, 27) = 3.35, p = .08).

In the 600-900 ms time window following the first postverbal noun onset, we

observed no effect of prime type (Fs < 1), suggesting that the priming effect had disappeared

by this point. Target type was significant by items but not by participants (F1 (1, 24) = 1.71,

p = .20; F2 (1, 27) = 6.42, p < .05), while there was no interaction between prime and target

type (Fs < 1). The intercept statistic was reliable, indicating that there was an overall bias

toward the recipient (F1 (1, 24) = 25.85, p < .01; F2 (1, 27) = 15.55, p < .01).

25

In the 900-1200 ms time window, the effect of prime type was significant by items

but not by participants (F1 (1, 22) = 1.38, p = .25; F2 (1, 25) = 5.42, p < .05). The priming

effect was reversed relative to the earlier time windows: Participants fixated more on the

recipient (relative to the theme) after PO than DO primes, perhaps indicating that the prime

sentences influenced anticipations of the second postverbal noun at this point (rather than

anticipations to the first postverbal noun, as in the earlier time windows). There was no

effect of target type (F1 < 1; F2 (1, 25) = 2.04, p = .17) nor an interaction between prime and

target type (Fs < 1), but there was an overall bias toward the recipient (intercept statistics: F1

(1, 22) = 21.26, p < .01, F2 (1, 25) = 36.47, p < .01).

To summarise, the earliest effects of prime type occurred in the time window 600-900 ms

after verb onset and they lasted until 600-900 ms after the first postverbal noun onset. Across

all materials, the earliest onset of the first postverbal noun occurred 858 ms after verb onset

(on average, it occurred 1120 ms (SE = 16) after the verb onset). Hence, it would be

extremely implausible to assume that the priming effect observed during the 600-900 ms time

window was due to participants being able to recognise the postverbal noun. To further

corroborate this point, we conducted additional analyses for the 740-840 ms time window

after the onset of the verb (i.e., the 100 ms time window that ended 18 ms before the earliest

postverbal noun onset, and 280 ms before the average postverbal noun onset) and observed a

significant effect of prime type (F1 (1, 28) = 4.53, p < .05; F2 (1, 27) = 4.44, p < .05).

Information about the postverbal noun was simply not available during this time period, so it

appears that priming had an influence on genuine top-down processing, i.e. anticipation of a

forthcoming noun. In fact, considering the commonly assumed 200 ms that are required to

plan a saccadic eye-movement (e.g., Matin, Shao, & Boff, 1993), priming emerged even

before the postverbal determiner had been processed, whose earliest onset (across all

materials) occurred 727 ms after the verb, averaging around 970 ms after verb onset.

26

Discussion

Experiment 1 provided clear evidence for syntactic priming of ditransitive structures in

comprehension. The visual-world eye-movement data showed that the duration and the

proportion of looks to the recipient and theme were affected by the DO or PO prime

structure: There were more and longer anticipatory gazes to the recipient (relative to the

theme) following DO than PO primes. Syntactic priming of PO vs. DO constructions has

repeatedly been reported for language production, and this is the first time that a comparable

effect has been established for comprehension. In contrast with previous studies (e.g.,

Branigan et al., 2005; Noppeney & Price, 2004; Pickering & Traxler, 2004), our study

rendered any semantic influence from the prime sentences unlikely. Similar to production

studies (e.g., Bock, 1986; Pickering & Branigan, 1998) the different prime conditions were

meaning equivalent, so in this sense, the priming effects were truly syntactic.

Importantly, we found that the priming manipulation had an influence on predictive

processing, that is, on the anticipation of properties of the argument following the verb:

Priming effects were established shortly after the onset of the verb and before linguistic

information about the postverbal noun phrase could have been processed. Our results

therefore expand the range of evidence in support of anticipatory eye-movements during

auditory sentence comprehension. Altmann & Kamide (1999; Kamide, Altmann, &

Haywood, 2003) argued that upon encountering a verb, the processor anticipates the most

likely forthcoming argument referent. The present study demonstrated that the processor

does not just anticipate the most likely forthcoming argument following the verb, but also the

relative ordering of arguments, that is, whether the theme or the recipient is mentioned first in

a ditransitive event. This provides evidence against models that assume that people do not

predict any structure before they encounter the postverbal noun phrase (e.g., Frazier, 1987).

Our data support the idea that argument order information is projected at the verb (e.g.,

Gorrell, 1995; MacDonald et al., 1994; Pritchett, 1992).

27

It is also important to note that in the Altmann and Kamide (1999) study, anticipatory

effects were driven by the semantics of the verb whereas in our study, they were triggered by

the syntactic structure of a preceding prime sentence that was read aloud. To conclude,

Experiment 1 showed an effect of recent exposure to a syntactic structure on the subsequent

comprehension of a structure projected from the same verb. Experiment 2 examined whether

the same kind of priming effect occurs when primes and targets do not share the same verbs.

Experiment 2

Experiment 1 provided clear evidence for priming of PO/DO ditransitive constructions when

the main verb was repeated between prime and target. Experiment 2 investigated whether

priming also occurs when the verb differs between prime and target. Production studies on

comparable structures have demonstrated that syntactic priming occurs when the verb is not

repeated (e.g., Bock, 1986, 1989; Pickering & Branigan, 1998; Branigan et al., 2000),

indicating that priming in production is at least partly independent of individual lexical items.

However, it is also partly lexically specific, as the priming effect is larger when the verb in

prime and target is repeated (e.g., Pickering & Branigan, 1998; Branigan et al., 2000). In

combination with the first experiment, Experiment 2 investigated whether syntactic priming

in comprehension is lexically specific, lexically independent, or a combination of the two.

This will establish potential differences in verb repetition effects between production and

comprehension.

Method

Participants. Thirty-two new participants from the same population as in Experiment 1 took

part in the experiment. They received either course credit or £4.00 in exchange of their

participation.

28

Materials. The prime and target materials were identical to those used in Experiment 1,

except for one important change: The verbs in the prime sentences (10a,b) were swapped

between items such that they were different from those in the corresponding target sentences

(11a,b). Moreover, care was taken to avoid pairings of verbs whose meanings were closely

related to one another (e.g., post and send).

(10a) The assassin will give the dictator the parcel.

(10b) The assassin will give the parcel to the dictator.

(11a) The pirate will send the princess the necklace.

(11b) The pirate will send the princess the necklace.

Design, Procedure, and Data Analysis. Design and procedures were identical to those in

Experiment 1. Analyses were carried out in exactly the same way as in Experiment 1. First,

we analysed durations of first gazes on recipient vs. theme objects initiated between the onset

of the verb and the onset of the postverbal determiner. Second, we analysed log gaze

probability ratios over time: In one set of analyses, the analyses were conducted from the

(item-specific) onset of the verb onwards, while in the other set, they were conducted from

the (item-specific) onset of the first postverbal noun.

Results

First-Gaze Durations. Table 2 shows the mean first-gaze durations on the recipient and

theme objects initiated between the verb and postverbal determiner onset separately for each

prime condition. ANOVAs with prime type and picture object as within-participants and -

items variables and participant/item list as a between-participants and -items variable showed

29

no reliable main effect of prime type (F1 (1, 26) = 2.97, p = .10; F2 < 1)4 but revealed a

significant main effect of picture object (F1 (1, 26) = 8.56, p < .01; F2 (1, 28) = 10.91, p <

.01): Gazes to (animate) recipient objects were longer than gazes to (inanimate) theme

objects. In contrast to Experiment 1, the prime type × picture object interaction was not

significant (Fs < 1) indicating that there was no trace of a priming effect.

[Insert Table 2 here]

Log gaze probability ratios. As in Experiment 1, we analysed log gaze probability ratios

(ln(P(recipient)/P(theme))) for 300 ms time intervals following the onset of the verb and the

first postverbal noun. The analyses were conducted in the same way as in Experiment 1.

Analyses relative to verb onset. Figure 4 plots the mean log gaze probability ratios for

each prime condition relative to the verb onset.

[Insert Figure 4 here]

Analyses of the different 300 ms windows after the verb onset showed a consistent

pattern. In none of the time windows was there an effect of prime type (0-300 ms: F1 (1, 27)

= 1.79, p = .19; F2 < 1; 300-600 ms: F1 < 1; F2 (1, 28) = 1.96, p = .17; 600-900 ms: Fs < 1;

900-1200 ms: Fs < 1; 1200-1500 ms: Fs < 1). Hence, there was no trace of a priming effect.

Instead, in the two early time windows (0-300 and 300-600 ms), there was an overall

recipient object (relative to theme) preference, as indicated by the intercept estimates, which

differed from zero (0-300 ms: F1 (1, 27) = 24.26, p < .01; F2 (1, 28) = 28.21, p < .01; 300-

600 ms: F1 (1, 28) = 14.08, p < .01; F2 (1, 28) = 16.61, p < .01). This preference for the

(animate) recipient object is similar to that observed in Experiment 1. This recipient

preference was much weaker in later time windows: 600-900 ms: F1 (1, 27) = 3.84, p = .06;

30

F2 (1, 28) = 1.97, p = .17; 900-1200 ms: F1 < 1; F2 (1, 28) = 1.56, p = .22; 1200-1500 ms: F1

(1, 28) = 3.85, p = .06; F2 (1, 28) = 2.45, p = .13.

Analyses relative to the first postverbal noun. The mean log gaze probability ratios

relative to the first postverbal noun onset are presented in Figure 4.

[Insert Figure 5 here]

In none of the time windows was there an effect of prime type (0-300 ms: Fs < 1; 300-

600 ms: Fs < 1; 600-900 ms: F1 (1, 25) = 1.49, p = .23; F2 < 1; 900-1200 ms: Fs < 1), so

there was no evidence that the prime structure affected the proportion of looks to the recipient

and theme.

In the 600-900 and 900-1200 ms time windows from the first postverbal noun onset,

there was an effect of target type (600-900 ms: F1 (1, 25) = 5.22. p < .05; F2 (1, 26) = 17.71,

p < .01; 900-1200 ms: F1 (1, 23) = 1.13, p = .30; F2 (1, 25) = 6.59, p < .05). In the 600-900

ms time window, participants looked more often at the recipient (relative to the theme) when

the target structure was a DO than when it was a PO. This indicates that when they heard the

first postverbal noun and it was a recipient, they looked more often at the recipient (relative

to theme) object than when it was a theme. By contrast, in the 900-1200 ms time window,

participants looked more often at the recipient (relative to the theme) when the target

structure was a PO than when it was a DO. On average, the onset of the second postverbal

noun occurred 1146 ms after the onset of the first postverbal noun, so this effect suggests that

after hearing a theme in the PO target sentences, participants anticipated that the second

postverbal noun was a recipient, whereas after hearing a recipient in the DO targets, they

anticipated a theme. There was no clear effect of target type in the earlier time windows (0-

300 ms: F1 (1, 26) = 3.04, p = .09; F2 (1, 26) = 1.02, p = .32; 300-600 ms: F1 (1, 27) = 2.29,

p = .14; F2 (1, 25) = 1.22, p = .28).

31

There was no interaction between prime and target type in any of the time windows

(0-300 ms: F1 < 1; F2 (1, 26) = 1.72, p = .20; 300-600 ms: Fs < 1; 600-900 ms: F1 (1, 25) =

1.65, p = .21; F2 (1, 26) = 1.10, p = .31; 900-1200 ms: F1 (1, 23) = 1.04, p = .32; F2 < 1).

Thus, in stark contrast to Experiment 1, we did not observe evidence for priming in any of the

analysis measures. If anything, log gaze ratio probabilities in the 600-900 ms time window

relative to verb onset (where we observed the earliest evidence for priming in Experiment 2)

went in the opposite direction: Log ratios were slightly more positive (i.e. more biased

towards the recipient object) in the PO priming condition (.16) than in the DO priming

condition (.09). To conclude, Experiment 2 suggested a complete absence of priming effects

when the verb is different in prime and target.

Combined analyses Experiments 1 and 2

In order to compare the results from the two experiments more directly, we conducted

analyses on the combined data from Experiments 1 and 2. Specifically, these comparisons

focused on (a) first-gaze durations between the verb and postverbal determiner onset and (b)

log gaze probability ratios in the 600-900 ms and 900-1200 ms time windows, as measured

from the onset of the verb.

For the analyses of the first-gaze durations, we conducted mixed-design ANOVAs

over participant means (F1) and item means (F2) with prime type and picture object as

repeated-measures variables, while experiment and participant/item list (I-IV) were treated as

between-participants and -items variables. These showed a significant three-way interaction

between prime type, picture object, and experiment (F1 (1, 54) = 6.90, p < .05; F2 (1, 28) =

4.30, p < .05), confirming that the priming effect, as reflected in the prime type × picture

object interaction, was substantially stronger when verbs were repeated between primes and

targets (Experiment 1) than when they were not repeated (Experiment 2).

32

We conducted mixed-design ANOVAs of the log gaze probability ratios by

participants and items with prime type as a repeated-measures variable, and experiment and

participant/item list (I-IV) as between-participants and -items variables. The analyses for the

600-900 ms time window showed a prime type by experiment interaction that was significant

by participants and marginal by items (F1 (1, 55) = 4.09, p = < .05; F2 (1, 28) = 3.54, p =

.07), suggesting, again, that the priming effect was stronger in Experiment 1 than in

Experiment 2. Analyses of the log gaze probability in the 900-1200 ms window revealed a

similar two-way interaction between prime type and experiment, which was significant by

participants (F1 (1, 56) = 6.58, p < .05; F2 (1, 28) = 1.88, p = .18). Overall, the results of the

first-gaze durations and log gaze probability ratios suggest that priming was stronger with

repeated verbs (Experiment 1) than with non-repeated verbs (Experiment 2). In the 0-300 ms

time window we also observed an effect of experiment (F1 (1, 53) = 5.48, p < .05; F2 (1, 27)

= 6.70, p < .05), suggesting that there were relatively more looks to the (animate) recipient in

Experiment 2 than in Experiment 1 just after the verb onset. The effect occurred before the

entire verb could have been processed, so it is unlikely that the stronger preference for the

recipient in Experiment 2 is due to linguistic processing of the verb. Instead, independent of

the verb, participants in Experiment 2 may have had a stronger recipient preference in

Experiment 2 than in Experiment 1. This effect is unrelated to priming.

Effect-Size Comparisons between comprehension and production

In order to determine differences in priming for ditransitive PO/DO structures in

comprehension and production, we compared our results with previous production data.

Specifically, we contrasted our results with findings from Pickering and Branigan (1998),

whose Experiment 1 was very similar to our studies in that it investigated the effects of verb

repetition on PO/DO priming in production.

33

In particular, we were interested in potential influences of processing modality

(production vs. comprehension) and verb repetition (same verb vs. different verb) on the

magnitudes of the observed priming effects. Of course, sentence completion studies and

visual-world experiments employ qualitatively rather different measures, that is, sentence

completion probabilities on the one hand and proportions and durations of gazes on picture

objects on the other. Yet in spite of such qualitative differences, we can quantify and

compare effect magnitudes between different measures by looking at the overall variability of

data points in the different measures, both between and within experimental design cells.

This is exactly what measures of statistical effect size are designed for.

A useful statistic for current purposes is partial eta-square5, which is defined as effect

variance in proportion to effect variance plus corresponding error variance (SSeffect / (SSeffect +

SSerror)). Quantifying effect size in terms of partial eta-square (which always yields a score

between 0 and 1) provides a measure that is independent of the original scale on which a

given effect was measured. Thus, partial eta-square is suitable for comparisons between

different measures.

We calculated partial eta-squares for our results and compared them with those

obtained from Pickering and Branigan (1998, Experiment 1). Table 3 shows the mean partial

eta-squares (averaged across participant and item analyses) for the prime type × target

completion interactions reported in Pickering and Branigan (1998, Experiment 1), separately

for repeated-verb vs. different-verb conditions; listed below this are the mean partial eta-

squares (again, averaged across participant and item analyses) for the corresponding prime

type × picture object interactions in our first-gaze duration data and in gaze probabilities

during the 600-900ms time interval from verb onset. (Note that the latter effect sizes were not

computed from the previously reported log-ratios, but from standard gaze probabilities on the

two critical picture objects. This was done to ensure maximum comparability with the

Pickering and Branigan data, which were not adjusted for linear dependencies in the design

matrix.

34

[Insert Table 3 here]

Two conclusions can be drawn from the table. First, priming magnitudes are

generally higher in production than in comprehension. Second, and more importantly, the

decrease in priming strength for comprehension (as compared to production) is substantially

more severe when verbs differ between primes and targets than when they are repeated: if the

verb stays the same, the priming effect in production exceeds that in comprehension by a

factor of 2.2 (for both gaze duration and probability effects); by contrast, if verbs differ

between primes and targets, proportional differences in priming strength become much more

profound, with the production effect exceeding that in comprehension by a factor of 32.0

(first-gaze duration) and 10.4 (gaze probability – note that the latter figure does not take into

account that the gaze-probability pattern in Experiment 2 suggested the opposite of priming).

It is also worth pointing out that according to general effect size conventions (Cohen, 1988),

partial eta-squares around .05 indicate ‘small but potentially relevant’ effects, whereas partial

eta-squares smaller than .01 are typically regarded as ‘negligible’. Taken together, the

present results point to an interesting difference in the importance of verb repetition between

production and comprehension.

Discussion

The results from Experiment 2 showed no evidence for priming when the verb differed

between primes and targets. A cross-experiment comparison indicated that this reduction in

priming strength for Experiment 2 was statistically reliable. Furthermore, comparisons of

effect sizes (in terms of partial eta-square) suggested that priming magnitudes in

comprehension are much more severely affected by verb repetition than priming magnitudes

35

in production. In fact, while priming in production appears partly independent of the verb,

priming in comprehension appears entirely verb specific.

General Discussion

The results from Experiment 1 provided clear evidence for syntactic priming during

comprehension in ditransitive PO or DO structures when the verb in prime and target was the

same, while Experiment 2 showed no evidence for priming when the verb was different.

Experiment 1 showed that during the presentation of the ditransitive verb, the structure of the

prime sentences affected participants' anticipations of the noun phrase immediately following

the verb. When participants had just read aloud a DO prime, they tended to look at the

recipient (relative to the theme) object longer and more often than when they had just read a

PO prime. In other words, when hearing the target verb, they anticipated that the first

postverbal argument (the theme or recipient) was the same as in the prime sentence. The

priming effect was extremely rapid, as it occurred before participants could have processed

any linguistic information provided by the postverbal noun phrase.

Experiment 1 showed that syntactic priming during comprehension occurred for

structures similar to those used in production studies investigating syntactic priming.

Importantly, the PO and DO structures are meaning-equivalent, so the observed priming

effects are due to the syntactic structure of the primes rather than due to their meaning, as

may have been the case in many previous studies on syntactic priming in comprehension.

Furthermore, our findings demonstrate that syntactic priming is not confined to temporarily

ambiguous sentences such as those tested in other studies.

The nature of anticipations

36

Our study provides new evidence about anticipatory processes during sentence

comprehension. Altmann and Kamide (1999) and Kamide, Altmann, and Haywood (2003)

showed that people anticipate upcoming postverbal arguments using both semantic and

syntactic (case marking) information in the prior sentence fragment. However, these studies

did not indicate whether people activate all possible arguments regardless of the order in

which they follow the verb or whether the anticipations also have a more structural

component related to the order of the arguments. Experiment 1 showed that people

anticipated the order of the arguments following the verb, indicating that the anticipations

include a structural component.

The anticipations were made before one of the arguments was heard. This provides

evidence against models of syntactic parsing that claim that the processor cannot attach the

NP node for the first postverbal argument into the tree structure until it has encountered that

argument. Probably the most influential model that makes this prediction is the garden-path

model, which assumes that no NP node can be projected until bottom-up evidence for a NP is

available in the input (Frazier, 1987; p. 561-562). Instead, the results support the idea that, at

least in the presence of a visual context, the order of the argument roles is projected at the

verb. This fits well with models that claim that syntactic information is represented at verbs

(e.g., Ford, Bresnan, & Kaplan, 1982; Gorrell, 1995; MacDonald et al., 1994; Pritchett,

1992). In these models, information about a verb's possible argument structures is accessed

as soon as the verb is encountered, so the processor can anticipate the order of the arguments

following the verb.

The priming effects in the current study are syntactic in nature, in the sense that they

are due to the syntactic structure of the primes rather than due to their semantic or other

properties. Furthermore, the anticipations have a structural component, because listeners

appear to anticipate the order in which the arguments follow the verb. However, the exact

nature of the linguistic information that is anticipated is currently less clear. Three different

types of information about the first postverbal argument may be anticipated at the verb. First,

37

listeners may anticipate the syntactic function of this argument. After PO primes people may

have anticipated a direct object immediately following the verb, while after DO primes they

may have anticipated an indirect object. Second, they may anticipate the thematic role of the

first postverbal argument, so that after PO primes they anticipated a theme and after DO

primes a recipient. Third, people may anticipate the animacy of the first postverbal

argument. After PO primes, they may have anticipated an inanimate noun immediately

following the verb and after DO primes they may have anticipated an animate (or perhaps

human) noun. The current study does not determine what the nature of the anticipated

information is, and whether more than one type of information is anticipated. A very similar

issue exists in production research. When people produce a ditransitive verb in the target,

priming may result in a high activation of a particular syntactic role, thematic role or of an

animate or inanimate noun phrase, all of which may result in priming. Some production

research has started to address these questions (e.g., Chang et al., 2003), and we expect that

future studies will shed more light on the kind of information that is being primed during

sentence comprehension.

Priming as an exposure-based effect

Our results demonstrated that sentence comprehension processes are affected by recent

exposure to a syntactic structure in the immediately preceding sentence. Importantly, it

appears that such effects of recent exposure are lexically specific rather than lexically

independent: The processing of ditransitive structures was affected by previously encountered

ditransitives that contained the same verb, but not by ditransitives that contained a different

verb. These findings are hard to reconcile with claims by Mitchell et al. (1995), who

suggested that the processor uses exposure-based information that is independent of lexical

items, but not lexically specific information. Mitchell et al. (1995) were mainly concerned

with long-lasting frequency effects resulting from repeated encounters with syntactic

38

structures. Such effects may of course be different from the effects of recent exposure in the

current study. However, it is unclear why long-lasting effects should be lexically

independent if there is no evidence that effects of recent exposure are lexically independent.

The findings fit better with lexicalist sentence processing models, which claim that

syntactic information is stored separately for individual lexical items (e.g., MacDonald et al.,

1994). Hence, exposure to a syntactic structure may facilitate subsequent comprehension of

that structure when it is used with the same verb, but not when it is used with a different verb.

This assumes that the use of exposure-based information is entirely lexically specific and

would explain the results from our experiments. However, most current lexicalist models

claim that the processor uses both lexically specific and lexically independent information.

For example, McRae et al. (1998) and Spivey and Tanenhaus (1998) incorporated two

different exposure-based constraints into their computational model, one taking into account

the frequency with which individual verbs are used with particular structures, and one taking

into account the overall frequency of the different structures across all verbs. Similarly,

spreading activation models predict both lexically specific and lexically independent effects

(e.g., Juliano & Tanenhaus, 1994; Tabor, Juliano, & Tanenhaus, 1997), because they claim

that the activation of a syntactic structure for a particular verb also spreads to other verbs.

Hence, these models do not explain why our study did not show any evidence for lexically

independent priming.

The finding that effects of recent syntactic exposure are lexically specific is consistent

with other studies that investigated syntactic priming during comprehension. As explained in

the Introduction, Branigan et al. (2005) observed priming effects in prepositional phrase

attachment ambiguities when the verb in the prime and target was the same, but not when

they were different. Similarly, Pickering and Traxler (2004) observed evidence for priming

in reduced relative/main clause ambiguities when the verb in the prime was repeated in the

target, whereas there was no priming when the verb was not repeated. As noted earlier, the

results from Branigan et al. (2005) may be due to perceptual priming, but nevertheless, both

39

Branigan et al.'s (2005) and Pickering and Traxler's (2004) results are consistent with the

view that recent exposure-based effects in comprehension are entirely lexically specific, an

idea which was first proposed by Pickering and Traxler (2004).

There are a number of studies that have shown priming effects in the absence of

lexical repetition (e.g., Branigan, 1995; Luka & Barsalou, 2005; Noppeney & Price, 2004),

but as argued in the Introduction, it is unclear whether the results reflect true syntactic

priming effects. However, there is one study that suggests that for some structures, priming

is at least partly lexically independent. As described in the introduction, Scheepers and

Crocker (2004) observed evidence for syntactic priming in German SVO/OVS word order

ambiguities in the absence of lexical repetition. One possible explanation for this

discrepancy with the current results is that the crucial parsing decision in their study was

made before the syntactic head was encountered. Their visual-world experiment showed a

priming effect at the case-ambiguous first NP in the sentence (the subject or object), so

participants decided whether this NP was the agent or patient in the depicted events before

the syntactic head, the verb, was encountered. One factor that may have promoted this early

onset of the priming effect is the fact that events were visually depicted in Scheepers and

Crocker study, enabling thematic predictions even before the verb. Crucially, because the

information from the verb was not available at this early point, the priming effect was

independent of the head of the sentence. This contrasts with the current study, where the

crucial syntactic decision was made at the verb. Further experimentation is needed to

confirm this conjecture, but the results from the current study and Scheepers and Crocker

(2004) do indicate that lexically independent priming is confined to particular conditions.

Priming in production and comprehension

The syntactic priming effects observed in the present study can be compared with results

from production studies using similar constructions (e.g., Bock, 1986; Pickering & Branigan,

40

1998). In line with production studies, we found evidence for syntactic priming in

ditransitive structures when the verb in prime and target was repeated. This finding is

consistent with the claim that syntactic priming occurs both in production and comprehension

(e.g., Pickering & Garrod, 2004; Branigan, Pickering, Liversedge, Stewart, & Urbach, 1995).

However, in contrast to production studies, no priming effect was observed when the prime

and target did not share the same verb. This suggests that although priming occurs in both

production and comprehension, it appears to be different in nature. For ditransitive structures,

priming in production is partly lexically independent, whereas priming in comprehension is

entirely lexically specific.

One possibility we need to consider is whether the current study investigated priming

between modalities, and that this is different from the within-modality priming in production

studies. In our experiments, participants read the prime sentences aloud, so it involved some

aspects of production. It might be that such cross-modality priming is entirely lexically

dependent, whereas priming within the same modality occurs even when the verbs in prime

and target are different. However, this explanation does not hold. First, reading aloud

involves comprehension processes too, so it also involves within-modality priming.

Therefore, if priming within the same modality occurs in the absence of verb repetition, we

should have observed it. Second, there is evidence for cross-modality priming in the absence

of verb repetition from studies where the target is produced (rather than comprehended, as in

our experiments). For example, Branigan et al. (2000) used a dialogue task in which

participants comprehended a ditransitive PO or DO sentence and then produced a ditransitive

sentence. They observed the same pattern as Pickering and Branigan (1998): Priming

occurred both when the verbs in prime and target were the same and when they were not,

though the priming effect was stronger with repeated verbs. Other studies have also shown

evidence for priming from comprehension to production in the absence of verb repetition

(e.g., Cleland & Pickering, 2003; Potter & Lombardi, 1998). Thus, it appears that what is

important for lexically independent priming is not whether priming is across or within

41

modality, but whether the target is comprehended or produced. Priming occurs in the

absence of verb repetition when the target is produced, but is entirely lexically specific when

the target is comprehended.

The reason why priming in production and comprehension are different may become

clear when considering the way in which speakers and listeners access lexical and syntactic

information. It is usually assumed that during language comprehension, people first access a

word before they incorporate it into the partial syntactic structure of the sentence. Hence,

syntactic information associated with a word may become available before the word is

incorporated into the partial structure and it may therefore constrain syntactic structure

building (e.g., Ford et al., 1982; Gorrell, 1995; MacDonald et al., 1994; Pritchett, 1992). For

example, when people processed the ditransitive verb in our target sentences, they may

immediately have projected the most activated subcategorisation frame (the PO or DO

structure) for that particular verb. If the same verb occurred in the prime, this resulted in

strong priming, because the prime affected the activation of the PO and DO structures

associated with the identical verb in the target. By contrast, if a different verb occurred in the

prime, the processor also projects the most activated subcategorisation frame associated with

the target verb, but in this case, the activation is unaffected by the prime verb, because it is

different.

In production, by contrast, lexical and syntactic processes may be partly independent

(cf. Bock & Levelt, 1994; Garrett, 1980, 1988), so the information flow may be less

constrained than in comprehension. In many cases, speakers may access the concepts they

would like to express and construct the syntactic structure of the sentence independently from

accessing the specific words. Hence, they may initially put the concepts in a particular order

(e.g., agent – transferring action – recipient – theme) before selecting specific words (e.g.,

deciding whether to use give or hand to express the act of transfer). At this point, the

activation of the subcategorisation frames of a specific verb cannot affect selection of a

syntactic structure because the specific verb and the syntactic information associated with it

42

have not been accessed. In such cases, speakers may project the structure that is most

activated across all verbs. This results in lexically independent priming. Only after selection

of the verb may syntactic information associated with it affect the syntactic structure. For

example, speakers might need to revise selection of a syntactic structure if they initially

selected a syntactic structure and later accessed a verb that is inconsistent with it (e.g., a DO

structure and donate). In sum, in production, speakers may select a syntactic structure before

accessing the verb, resulting in lexically independent priming. Lexically-specific priming

may only occur when speakers access the verb before they determine the constituent order of

the sentence.

The explanation for the lexically-independent priming effects in production is similar

to the explanation for the findings from Scheepers and Crocker’s (2004) study, who observed

evidence for lexically-independent priming during comprehension. As mentioned earlier, in

their study, people decided whether a noun phrase was an agent or patient before they

encountered the verb. As in production, people built a syntactic structure before they

accessed the syntactic head, the verb (depiction of the events might have facilitated this

process). Hence, we conjecture that syntactic priming in both production and comprehension

is lexically-independent when the processor selects a structure before the syntactic head is

accessed, whereas it is lexically-specific when the head is accessed first.

Conclusions

Our eye-movement data showed evidence for syntactic priming in comprehension using

ditransitive structures similar to those used in production studies that investigated syntactic

priming. In line with production studies, we observed syntactic priming when the prime and

target sentences shared the same verb, but in contrast to production studies, no evidence for

priming was observed when the verb was not shared. Thus, for ditransitive structures,

43

syntactic priming in comprehension is entirely lexically specific, in contrast to syntactic

priming in production.

The results suggest that lexical-syntactic information plays an important role during

sentence processing. The priming effects that we observed occurred at the verb, which

subcategorised for a PO or DO structure. This indicates that the processor projects syntactic

structures at the verb (the syntactic head) and does not delay structure building until bottom-

up information from the following noun phrase is encountered. When projecting a syntactic

structure, it uses information based on recent exposure to the verb. If a verb has recently

been encountered with a particular syntactic structure, this structure is highly activated and is

therefore likely to be projected during a subsequent encounter of the same verb. By contrast,

structure building at the verb is unaffected by recent exposure to structures associated with

other verbs. We argue that this may be because during lexical access of the verb, the

processor immediately accesses information about the syntactic structures associated with it,

and therefore ignores information associated with other verbs. As a result, the processor

takes into account lexically-specific exposure-based information, but not lexically-

independent exposure-based information.

44

Tables:

Table 1.

Mean first-gaze durations in milliseconds (standard errors in parentheses) for each prime

condition and picture object, Experiment 1.

Double object prime Prepositional object prime

Recipient object Theme object Recipient object Theme object

First-Gaze duration 731 (37) 634 (35) 674 (40) 801 (41)

Table 2.

Mean first-gaze durations in milliseconds (standard errors in parentheses) for each prime

condition and picture object, Experiment 2.

Double object prime Prepositional object prime

Recipient object Theme object Recipient object Theme object

First-Gaze duration 746 (43) 605 (33) 779 (46) 623 (32)

Table 3.

Mean partial eta-squares for Pickering and Branigan’s (1998, Exp. 1) production data and for

our own comprehension data from Experiments 1 and 2.

Repeated Verb Different Verb

Production data (Pickering & Branigan, 1998) .4482 .0469

Comprehension data (current experiments):

First-gaze duration

.2019 (Exp 1)

.0015 (Exp 2)

Gaze probability (600-900 ms after verb onset) .2014 (Exp 1) .0045 (Exp 2)

45

Figures:

Figure 1: Example scene used in Experiment 1. Participants either heard The pirate will send

the princess the necklace (9a) or The pirate will send the necklace to the princess (9b).

Figure 2: Visual bias towards the recipient object relative to the theme object, as measured by

ln(P(recipient)/P(theme)), for each prime condition in Experiment 1, plotted in 20 ms

intervals following the onset of the main verb. The solid lines indicate the average onsets of

the post-verbal determiner (970 ms, ranging from 727 ms to 1283 ms across items) and the

following noun (1120 ms, ranging from 858 ms to 1423 ms across items).

46

Figure 3: Visual bias towards the recipient object relative to the theme object, as measured by

ln(P(recipient)/P(theme)), for each prime x target condition in Experiment 1, plotted in 20 ms

intervals following the onset of the postverbal noun. The solid lines indicate the average

onsets of the 2nd post-verbal determiner (950 ms, ranging from 699 ms to 1621 ms across

items) and the following noun (1146 ms, ranging from 822 ms to 1751 ms across items).

Figure 4: Visual bias towards the recipient object relative to the theme object, as measured by

ln(P(recipient)/P(theme)), for each prime condition in Experiment 2, plotted in 20 ms

intervals following the onset of the main verb. The solid lines indicate the average onsets of

the post-verbal determiner (970 ms, ranging from 727 ms to 1283 ms across items) and the

following noun (1120 ms, ranging from 858 ms to 1423 ms across items).

47

Figure 5: Visual bias towards the recipient object relative to the theme object, as measured by

ln(P(recipient)/P(theme)), for each prime x target condition in Experiment 2, plotted in 20 ms

intervals following the onset of the postverbal noun. The solid lines indicate the average

onsets of the 2nd post-verbal determiner (950 ms, ranging from 699 ms to 1621 ms across

items) and the following noun (1146 ms, ranging from 822 ms to 1751 ms across items).

48

Author notes

This research was conducted as part of the first author’s PhD. at the University of Dundee.

The order of the second and third author is random, both contributed equally to the research

reported in this article. RvG acknowledges the support from ESRC award RES-000-23-1363.

We would like to thank Robin Hill for his help with constructing the experimental materials

and Leila Kantola, Jools Simner, and Matt Traxler for comments on an earlier version of this

article.

49

Appendix

The 32 sets of experimental sentences used in Experiment 1 and 2; the (a) versions are the

primes in Experiment 1, the (b) versions are the primes in Experiment 2, and the (c) versions

are the targets in both Experiments 1 and 2. Only the DO versions are shown.

1a. The schoolgirl will show the teacher the drawing.

1b. The schoolgirl will mail the teacher the drawing.

1c. The magician will show the girl the card.

2a. The nanny will give the child the chocolate.

2b. The nanny will post the child the chocolate.

2c. The soldier will give the queen the flag.

3a. The skier will lend the novice the equipment.

3b. The skier will send the novice the equipment.

3c. The diver will lend the hitchhiker the bike.

4a. The farmer will loan the student the jeep.

4b. The farmer will offer the student the jeep.

4c. The artist will loan the surgeon the car.

5a. The friend will send the newlyweds the telegram.

5b. The friend will show the newlyweds the telegram.

5c. The grandmother will send the boy the book.

6a. The shopkeeper will post the customer the goods.

50

6b. The shopkeeper will offer the customer the goods.

6c. The doctor will post the boxer the prescription.

7a. The woman will hand the swimmer the towel.

7b. The woman will lend the swimmer the towel.

7c. The vampire will hand the maid the spoon.

8a. The thief will sell the man the watch.

8b. The thief will loan the man the watch.

8c. The priest will sell the bandit the cigars.

9a. The surveyor will mail the residents the questionnaire.

9b. The surveyor will send the residents the questionnaire.

9c. The nun will mail the wrestler the parcel.

10a. The director will offer the actor the biscuits.

10b. The director will hand the actor the biscuits.

10c. The pilot will offer the stewardess the drink.

11a. The landlord will rent the guest the motorboat.

11b. The landlord will offer the guest the motorboat.

11c. The monk will rent the knight the horse.

12a. The agent will forward the client the catalogue.

12b. The agent will loan the client the catalogue.

12c. The diva will forward the bellboy the note.

51

13a. The celebrity will show the interviewer the necklace.

13b. The celebrity will sell the interviewer the necklace.

13c. The warrior will show the peasant the key.

14a. The footballer will give the actress the gift.

14b. The footballer will mail the actress the gift.

14c. The angel will give the girl the pear.

15a. The hunter will lend the criminal the gun.

15b. The hunter will rent the criminal the gun.

15c. The ice skater will lend the cowboy the gloves.

16a. The librarian will loan the researcher the journal.

16b. The librarian will forward the researcher the journal.

16c. The scientist will loan the graduate the microscope.

17a. The assassin will send the dictator the parcel.

17b. The assassin will give the dictator the parcel.

17c. The pirate will send the princess the necklace.

18a. The recruit will post the manager the report.

18b. The recruit will forward the manager the report.

18c. The professor will post the model the banknote.

19a. The trainer will hand the athlete the baton.

19b. The trainer will lend the athlete the baton.

19c. The astronaut will hand the cheerleader the rose.

52

20a. The chemist will sell the junkie the drug.

20b. The chemist will send the junkie the drug.

20c. The chef will sell the burglar the radio.

21a. The kidnapper will mail the millionaire the ransom note.

21b. The kidnapper will show the millionaire the ransom note.

21c. The inmate will mail the judge the present.

22a. The officer will offer the investor the whiskey.

22b. The officer will post the investor the whiskey.

22c. The clown will offer the baby the balloon.

23a. The nobleman will rent the playboy the castle.

23b. The nobleman will sell the playboy the castle.

23c. The bodybuilder will rent the runner the chain-saw.

24a. The secretary will forward the financier the bill.

24b. The secretary will give the financier the bill.

24c. The opera singer will forward the hippie the ticket.

25a. The woman will show the teenager the scarf.

25b. The woman will lend the teenager the scarf.

25c. The bride will show the detective the glass.

26a. The lady will give the beggar the bread.

26b. The lady will hand the beggar the bread.

53

26c. Santa will give the toddler the kite.

27a. The waiter will offer the pianist the wine.

27b. The waiter will post the pianist the wine.

27c. The mermaid will offer the waiter the bottle.

28a. The novelist will send the editor the draft.

28b. The novelist will hand the editor the draft.

28c. The wizard will send the prince the poison.

29a. The mountaineer will lend the hiker the helmet.

29b. The mountaineer will rent the hiker the helmet.

29c. The pope will lend the ballerina the painting.

30a. The activist will hand the pedestrian the flyer.

30b. The activist will mail the pedestrian the flyer.

30c. The Indian will hand the tourist the map.

31a. The applicant will post the company the form.

31b. The applicant will give the company the form.

31c. The nurse will post the general the cassette.

32a. The boss will mail the employees the newsletter.

32b. The boss will show the employees the newsletter.

32c. The Eskimo will mail the tramp the coat.

54

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1 The full set of experimental items (i.e. target pictures & audio stimuli) can be obtained from

the first author.

2 Analyses on the proportions of looks to the recipient and theme without log transformation

showed very similar results to the log gaze probability ratios in both Experiments 1 and 2.

3 The intercept statistic in ANOVA establishes whether the grand mean is significantly

different from zero, equivalent to a one-sample t-test.

4 Two participants had to be excluded from the F1 analysis because in one or more of the

experimental conditions, these participants did not have any valid first-gaze durations.

5 Partial eta-square was relatively easy to compute from the descriptive figures and MSe

scores provided in Pickering & Branigan (1998). Alternative measures would have required

additional information that was not available in the paper. Note, however, that more complex

measures are not necessarily superior to partial eta-square for present purposes.