Short-lived effect

Levelt and Kelter (1982) were among the first to address the issue of whether the distance in speech production between the prime and the target influences the effect of priming in spoken L1 Dutch production. In their first experiment, the participants were shown pairs of pictures and questions that begin with a preposition and ones that do not, (e.g., Aan wie laat Paul zijn stok zien? – To whom lets Paul his

cane see? vs. Wie laat Paul zijn stok zien? – whom lets Paul see his cane?) (Levelt & Kelter, 1982, p. 81). Respondents can answer these two questions with or without a corresponding preposition, (e.g., Aan Michael vs. Michael). Levelt and Kelter (1982, p. 78) referred to responding to a question beginning with a preposition with an answer beginning with a correspondent preposition as the correspondence effect

(Levelt & Kelter, 1982, p. 78). They found a strong ‘correspondence effect’: respondents’ tended to include a preposition in their answers if the questions they were asked included one.

Levelt and Kelter’s (1982) second experiment tested whether or not respondents showed a greater correspondence effect when they were exposed to distracting information. Instead of one question, the participants were asked two. The order of the questions was manipulated to create the priming conditions. The first condition involved an experimental question that was immediately followed by a corresponding picture. The second condition involved an experimental question that was separated from the corresponding picture by a long or short distracting question. Subsequently, the participants were shown a picture and were asked to answer only the question that corresponds to it. The finding showed that the length of the

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distraction question did not significantly affect the size of the correspondence effect (Levelt & Kelter, 1982, p. 85). A correspondence effect was found for the condition where the experimental questions were separated by a distraction question, but slightly higher for when no distracting question separated the experimental question from the corresponding picture (Levelt & Kelter, 1982, p. 86).

The third experiment was a brief interaction over the phone with shopkeepers. In the first condition, the shopkeepers were asked a question beginning with a

preposition about the time when they close their shops, or one that does not begin with a preposition, (e.g., Hoe laat gaat uw winkel dicht? – what time does your shop close?) (Levelt & Kelter, 1982, p. 89). In the second condition, they were asked the same question, but with an additional piece of information at the end (Hoe laat gaat uw winkel dicht, want ik moet er special voor naar de stad komen, ziet u? – what time does your shop close since I have to come into the town especially there for, you see?)

(Levelt & Kelter, 1982, p. 89). The findings suggested a significant correspondence effect in the condition where no additional information was added to the questions. However, no correspondence effect was obtained when over one intervening clause between the question and the answer, i.e. prime and target, occurred (Levelt & Kelter, 1982, p. 90). One issue to raise about Levelt and Kelter’s (1982) is that there is very high lexical overlap between the questions they included as primes and the answers provided by the participants. The finding that the respondents retained the preposition when the questions they were asked contained one can potentially be explained by the lexical repetition of the preposition or other components of the question as opposed to a correspondence strategy with the function of increasing fluency.

In line with Levelt and Kelter’s study, Branigan et al. (1999) carried out a sentence completion experiment to investigate dative alternation priming in written L1 English. The participants were handed booklets that include sentences to complete.

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The fragments contained primes and targets of double objects, (e.g., The woman sent the insurance company …), and prepositional datives, (e.g., The woman sent the insurance claim ...), adjacent to each other, but sometimes separated with 1 or 4 intervening intransitive fragments (e.g., The moody teenager grumbled …) (Branigan et al., 1999, p. 636). The intervening fragments contained intransitive verbs that did not induce speakers to produce any of the alternating two constructions. The study revealed a strong priming tendency whereby the participants produced the same construction as the prime when no unrelated sentences interfered between the prime and the target. However, a significant decline in the priming effect was observed when as little as one unrelated sentence interfered between the prime and the target, and no significant priming effect at all when the prime and target were four unrelated

sentences apart (Branigan et al., 1999, p. 638 ). Therefore, the authors argued that their findings are in harmony with the transient activation account of priming,

suggesting that the greater prime-target pair distance causes a diminishment in written production priming.

The issue with Branigan et al. (1999) study is that they seem to have assumed that the subsequent reproduction of a primed structure, e.g., the prepositional dative, relative to the double object alternative by necessity is a consequence of successful priming of the primed structure. However, as I will show in section 2.11.4, the choice language users make between a prepositional dative and a double object construction is also subject to factors that are not priming related, e.g., the discourse accessibility of the recipient and the definiteness of the theme, etc… (Bresnan, Cueni, Nikita, & Baayen, 2007, p. 74). It would have benefited Branigan et al.’s (1999) study to consider some of these variables that could change what they constitute as ‘priming’ and thus might still result in a diminishment of the priming effect over short prime- target distances.

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Wheeldon and Smith (2003) came to lend support to the short-lived effect of priming in L1 English spoken production. They conducted two experiments

investigating the priming effect of the initial phrase of a noun phrase. The participants were presented with two pictures of two objects on the screen moving in different directions: towards each other, apart from each other, to the right or to the left. The pictures were designed to elicit a sentence with an initial noun phrase containing two nouns making the targets as in the example (3) below:

(3) Target: The spoon and the car move up/down/apart/together. Related: The fish and the eye move apart/together/up/down. Unrelated: The fish moves up/down and the eye moves down/up. (Wheeldon & Smith, 2003, p. 436).

Sentences with an initial noun phrase featuring two nouns were considered related targets. Sentences with an initial phrase containing only one noun were considered unrelated targets. The participants were then asked to describe the experimental pictures which were moving on a screen for a duration of 1500 ms (Wheeldon & Smith, 2003, p. 437). The pictures were removed 500s after the completion of the description. The first experiment design allowed for an interval of two seconds after the completion of each description before a new experimental picture pair was introduced (Wheeldon & Smith, 2003, pp. 437–438). The distance between experimental trials was manipulated by including filler trials with only one or three pictures for each trial (Wheeldon & Smith, 2003, p. 436). The first experiment tested for the internal phrase structure priming without intervening items but also with three intervening items. The second experiment compared priming at no intervening items with priming at one intervening item. Significant priming was observed in experiment 1 only in the first condition where no intervening sentences were included (Wheeldon & Smith, 2003, p. 438). Similarly, no evidence for priming was found when one unrelated intervening trial was included (Wheeldon & Smith, 2003, p. 439).

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The short-lived priming effect was interpreted based on the transient activation account where the activation of a node immediately diminishes in order to block the ‘’…immediate reselection of linguistic units’’ (Wheeldon & Smith, 2003, p. 440). Interestingly, the authors used only one structure to study the duration of syntactic priming and the mechanism that explains it. However, the results might be different if the authors were to conduct the same experimental design to investigate the priming of more structures.

To summarize, syntactic priming in the studies reported in this section where the priming effect diminishes with the increase of prime-target pair distance were interpreted as evidence for the transient activation account of priming. That is, exposure to a prime activates the mental processes responsible for its reproduction. This activation rapidly declines when unrelated sentences separate the prime from the target. The next section will review syntactic priming studies adopting the implicit learning account as an explanation for priming.