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The Time Course of Verb-Specific Priming
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Poster E43 in Poster Session E, Thursday, October 26, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Lewis Ball1, Matthew Mak1, Adam Curtis1, Rachel Ryskin2, Jennifer Rodd3, Gareth Gaskell1; 1University of York, 2University of California, Merced, 3University College London
Certain aspects of lexical information can be primed by recent usage, such as a homonym's subordinate meaning (Rodd et al., 2013) or a word’s dispreferred grammatical class (Mak et al., in press). The magnitude of this priming is also maintained when participants sleep soon after initial exposure to primed information (Gaskell et al., 2019; Mak et al., in press). The supporting role of sleep can be explained by the episodic context account (Gaskell et al., 2019). This theory suggests that during discourse processing, a context-specific representation of the linguistic episode is encoded in episodic memory. These representations bind together key elements of the episode, potentially biassing how previously encountered words are later processed. Crucially, these episodic representations are potentially subject to sleep-related consolidation, in which sleep facilitates the integration of episodic memories into long-term knowledge, thereby maintaining their utility over extended periods. In this study, we investigated priming effects in relation to syntactic structure. Previous work has revealed malleability of specific verb biases based on recent experience, persisting for at least two minutes (Ryskin et al., 2017). We aimed to extend these findings further by investigating the longer-term persistence of verb-specific priming and possible mechanisms that may support it. We made use of syntactically ambiguous sentences, such as “The woman verb-ed the dog with the stick”. Verbs such as “hit” favour an instrument interpretation (the woman used the stick), whilst verbs such as “chose” favour a modifier interpretation (the dog possessed the stick). In Experiment 1, participants (n=60) first completed a study phase, where 12 (of 24) verbs were primed towards their dispreferred syntactic interpretation. This was achieved by presenting verbs within sentences along with visual scenes that constrained the dispreferred interpretation. ~20 minutes later in a test phase, both primed and unprimed verbs were encountered in syntactically ambiguous contexts. That is, after processing a sentence containing the verb, participants were visually presented with both syntactic interpretations and were asked to select their favoured one. Selected interpretations were analysed via generalised linear mixed-effects modelling. We observed an interaction between priming and pre-existing verb bias, suggesting that prior exposure influenced how verbs were processed ~20 minutes later. In Experiment 2 (n=111 participants), a ~12 hour delay that included a period of sleep separated the study and test phases. Here, there was no interaction between priming and pre-existing verb bias. As an exploratory analysis, we analysed the data from the two experiments collectively. This revealed a significant interaction between priming and pre-existing verb bias, but no three-way interaction that included priming, verb bias and experiment, suggesting similar patterns of priming across experiments. These results suggest that verb-specific priming can persist ~20 minutes after initial exposure. Further, given exploratory evidence of similar patterns of priming across experiments, this could suggest that priming persists at longer intervals of ~12 hours, possibly due to sleep-related consolidation of encoded knowledge. This finding is broadly consistent with the episodic context account, although future studies would need to address the potential benefit of sleep more directly.
Topic Areas: Syntax and Combinatorial Semantics,