The Effect of Intervening Sentences on Lexically Independent Priming and the Lexical Boost

We conducted structural priming experiments in which participants first read aloud and completed a prime fragment using pictures, followed by a target fragment. We manipulated whether the structure in the prime consisted of an adjective followed by a noun (e.g., "the underlined ..." presented with a picture of an underlined cat or crown) or a noun followed by a relative clause (e.g., "the ... that is underlined" with a picture of an underlined cat or crown), as well as whether the noun in the prime and target was the same (cat) or different (crown and cat). Participants could complete the target fragment using either an adjective-noun or noun-relative clause structure (e.g., "The ..." presented with a picture of a highlighted cat). In Experiment 1, we also manipulated whether the target immediately followed the prime or there were two unrelated intervening sentences between the prime and target. In Experiments 2 and 3, there were two intervening sentences in all conditions. Experiments 1 and 2 had a single prime, whereas Experiment 3 had two primes that both had the same structure and same noun. The first of these primes was a complete noun phrase that participants read aloud, either an adjective-noun or noun-relative clause structure, followed by a prime and target fragment with pictures. All experiments were conducted online using the experiment software Gorilla.