Syntactic Priming Effects on the Processing of Japanese Sentences with Canonical and Scrambled Word Orders

Abstract

The present study conducted two experiments to examine the effects of syntactic priming in sentence comprehension, using a cross-modal priming task which required participants to make acceptability judgment of Japanese sentences with canonical and scrambled word orders. Experiment 1 investigated whether or not the speed of target sentence processing would be affected by the syntactic structure of prime sentences. Prime sentences matching target sentences in word order facilitated processing of target sentences even though prime-target pairs shared no content words, while prime-target pairs with mismatched word orders demonstrated weak facilitation effects. Experiment 2 examined the processing speed of target sentences primed by a sequence of nouns without any syntactic structure. The weak priming effects disappeared in the noun prime condition, which suggested that those observed in the mismatch condition in Experiment 1 were due to partial overlap of the syntactic structure. The overall results showed that the priming effects observed in these experiments were syntactic in nature and independent of lexical⁄semantic priming.