Structural Priming of Adjunct Position

Four experiments investigated structural priming of adjunct phrase position in a sentence in order to investigate how they are represented. In Experiment 1, we manipulated the position of an adverb within the prime sentence: it appeared either before the verb (The driver frequently shaved) or after it (The driver shaved frequently). Participants read the prime sentence aloud and then described a target picture using a word or words underneath, for example, a picture of a sailor shaving with the word “carefully” underneath it. The target verb was either the same as in the prime (both “shaved”) or different (“stretched” and “shaved”). In Experiment 2, we manipulated the position of a temporal phrase in the prime sentence: it appeared either at the beginning of the sentence (e.g., “before breakfast the driver stretched”) or at the end (“the driver stretched before breakfast”). As in Experiment 1, we also manipulated verb repetition between the prime and target. Experiments 3 and 4 were the same as Experiments 1 and 2 respectively, but instead of manipulating verb repetition, we manipulated the repetition of either the adverb (Experiment 3) or the temporal phrase (Experiment 4).