The “sense boost” to dative priming: Evidence for sense-specific verb-structure links

This study used syntactic priming to investigate this issue. Experiment 1 showed a “sense boost” to dative priming: Stronger priming was observed when the dative verbs in prime and target sentences were used in the same sense than when they were used in different senses. Experiment 2 showed that, in the absence of sense repetition, form overlap between the head verbs of prime and target sentences still caused a boost to dative priming. Finally, Experiment 3 confirmed that the sense boost observed in Experiment 1 was not caused by a general difference in priming strength between dative prime sentences with literal ‘transfer’ vs. more abstract or figurative meanings: When the target pictures depicted the target verbs’ abstract senses, prime sentences with abstract meanings caused stronger priming than prime sentences describing a concrete transfer. These results suggest that the various senses of dative verbs have separate representations that are linked to the syntactic constructions they can be used in.
Source: Journal of Memory and Language - Category: Speech Therapy Source Type: research