Meaning, sound, and syntax: Lexical priming in sentence production.

Abstract

Theories of sentence production based on speech errors divide lexical-syntactic integration pro-cesses into two components. The first involves formulating an abstract structural representation that includes semantically specified lexical items. The second involves placing phonologically specified content words into a syntactic frame whose configuration is determined by the initial structural representation. Syntactic form thus may be influenced directly by variations in the semantic process-ing of words, but not by variations in phonological processing. This hypothesis was tested and sup-ported in two experiments. In both, participants produced extemporaneous picture descriptions. Production of each description was preceded by the presentation of a priming word that was semanti-cally or phonologically related to a target word likely to occur in the description. Semantically primed targets tended to appear as the subjects of active and passive sentences, whereas the same targets when they were not primed were more likely to appear as the objects. Phonological priming, although equal to semantic priming in ability to elicit the target words, was not reliably related to syntactic form. The coordination of words and syntax is one of the most im-portant problems that must be solved by the processing system

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