Effects of Visual Cues on the Lexical Boost Effect in Structural Priming

Four structural priming experiments used a sentence fragment completion task in which participants had to complete both prime and target sentence fragments. We manipulated (1) the prime structure (prepositional object or double object eliciting ditransitive structure, e.g., the cleaner showed the ladder to ... or the cleaner showed the apprentice ...) and (2) whether a word in the prime was repeated in the target. Target fragments consisted of a subject noun phrase followed by a verb (e.g., A painter lent …), which participants could complete as either a prepositional object or double object structure. In Experiments 1 and 2, we manipulated the repetition of the subject noun, whereas in Experiments 3 and 4, we manipulated the repetition of the ditransitive verb. We used two different tasks in order to investigate whether structural priming was affected by whether participants could see the prime when completing the target. In Experiments 1 and 3, participants received booklets and provided hand-written completions to the sentence fragments, so they could see the prime and target simultaneously. In Experiments 2 and 4, participants typed responses to the sentence fragments that appeared one-by-one on a computer screen, so they could not see earlier fragments and completions. As the dependent variable, we scored whether participants completed the target fragments with a prepositional object or double object structure.