Hostname: page-component-7dd5485656-c8zdz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-10-31T05:16:07.436Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Beyond syntactic priming: Evidence for activation of alternative syntactic structures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2011

MARINA VASILYEVA  and
HEIDI WATERFALL
MARINA VASILYEVA*
Affiliation:
Boston College
HEIDI WATERFALL
Affiliation:
Cornell University
*
[*]Address for correspondence: Marina Vasilyeva, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467. tel: 617-552-1755; fax: 617-552-1981; e-mail: vasilyev@bc.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Priming methodology was previously used to investigate children's ability to represent abstract syntactic forms. Existing evidence indicates that following exposure to a particular syntactic structure (such as the passive voice), English-speaking children increase their production of that structure with new lexical items. In the present work, we utilize priming methodology to explore whether exposure to passive primes may increase children's production of sentences that have a different structure but share a similar purpose in discourse. We report three studies, two involving English- and Russian-speaking children, and a third involving Russian-speaking adults. Unlike English, Russian offers a variety of syntactic forms that emphasize the patient of a transitive action, thus fulfilling the discourse function of the passive. We found that English speakers increased the use of the particular syntactic form presented in the prime, whereas Russian speakers increased their production of several different syntactic forms used to emphasize the patient of the action.

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 39 , Issue 2 , March 2012 , pp. 258 - 283
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

REFERENCES

Abels, K. (2001). Predicate cleft constructions in Russian. In Franks, S. & Yardoff, M (eds), Proceedings of FASL 9, 1–19.Google Scholar
Babyonyshev, M. & Brun, D. (2004). The acquisition of perfective and imperfective passive constructions in Russian. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 10, 17–31.Google Scholar
Babyonyshev, M., Fein, R., Ganger, J., Pesetsky, D. & Wexler, K. (2001). The maturation of grammatical principles: Evidence from Russian unaccusatives. Linguistic Inquiry 32, 1–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bar-Shalom, E. (2002). Tense and aspect in early child Russian. Language Acquisition 10, 321–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bencini, G. M. & Valian, V. V. (2008). Abstract sentence representations in 3-year-olds: Evidence from language production and comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language 59, 97–113.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berman, R. A. & Slobin, D. I. (1994). Relating events in narrative: A cross-linguistic developmental study. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Bock, K. (1986). Syntactic persistence in language production. Cognitive Psychology 18, 355–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bock, K. (1990). Structure in language: Creating form in talk. American Psychologist 45, 1221–36.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bock, K., Loebell, H. & Morey, R. (1992). From conceptual roles to structural relations: Bridging the syntactic cleft. Psychological Review 99, 150–71.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Chang, F., Bock, K. & Goldberg, A. E. (2003). Can thematic roles leave traces of their places? Cognition 90, 29–49.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Collins, P. (1991). Cleft and pseudo-cleft constructions in English. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Demuth, K. (1990). Subject, topic and Sesotho passive. Journal of Child Language 17, 67–84.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Djurkovic, M. (2007). Structural frequency effects in L1 acquisition of the passive and impersonal in Serbian. In Gülzow, I. & Gagarina, N. (eds), Frequency effects in language acquisition, 237–69. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Erteschik-Shir, N. (1979). Discourse constraints on dative movement. In Laberge, S. and Sankoff, G. (eds), Syntax and semantics, 441–67. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Fagan, S. M. (1988). The English Middle. Linguistic Inquiry 19, 181–203.Google Scholar
Fox, D. & Grodzinsky, Y. (1998). Children's passive: A view from the by-phrase. Linguistic Inquiry 29, 311–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fujita, K. (1994). Middle, ergative and passive in English – a Minimalist perspective. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 22, 71–90.Google Scholar
Gámez, P. B., Shimpi, P. M., Waterfall, H. & Huttenlocher, J. (2009). Priming a perspective in Spanish monolingual children: The use of syntactic alternatives. Journal of Child Language 36, 269–90.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Goldberg, A. E. (2003). Constructions: A new theoretical approach to language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7, 219–24.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gordon, P. & Chafetz, J. (1990). Verb-based versus class-based accounts of actionality effects in children's comprehension of passives. Cognition 36, 227–54.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hale, K. & Keyser, S. (1993). On argument structure and the lexical expression of syntactic relations. In Hale, K. & Keyser, S. (eds), The view from building 20, 53–109. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Harris, F. N. & Flora, J. A. (1982). Children's use of get passives. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 11, 297–311.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huttenlocher, J., Vasilyeva, M. & Shimpi, P. (2004). Syntactic priming in young children. Journal of Memory and Language 50, 182–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Israel, M., Johnson, C. & Brooks, P. (2000). From state to events: The acquisition of English passive participles. Cognitive Linguistics 11, 103–129.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keyser, S. J. & Roeper, T. (1984). On the middle and ergative constructions in English. Linguistic Inquiry 15, 381–416.Google Scholar
Kiss, K. E. (1995). Discourse configurational languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krylova, O. A. & Khavronina, S. A. (1986). Por'adok slov v Russkom jazike [The word order in Russian language]. Moscow: Russkij Jazik.Google Scholar
Lempert, H. (1990). Acquisition of passives: The role of patient animacy, salience and lexical accessibility. Journal of Child Language 17, 677–96.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Maratsos, M., Fox, D. E., Becker, J. A. & Chalkley, M. A. (1985). Semantic restrictions on children's passives. Cognition 19, 167–91.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Naigles, L. R. (2002). Form is easy, meaning is hard: Resolving a paradox in early child language. Cognition 86, 157–99.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nakazawa, H. (2005). The imperfective passive and animacy in Russian. In Takagaki, T., Zaima, S., Tsuruga, Y., Fernandez, F. & Kawaguchi, Y. (eds), Corpus-based approaches to sentence structures, 191–212. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Partee, B. H. (1998). Copula inversion puzzles in English and Russian. In Dziwirek, K., Coats, J., Vakareliyska, & C. (eds), Formal approaches to Slavic linguistics, 361–95. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications.Google Scholar
Pickering, M. J. & Branigan, H. P. (1998). The representation of verbs: Evidence from syntactic priming in language production. Journal of Memory and Language 39, 633–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pickering, M. J. & Ferreira, V. S. (2008). Structural priming: A critical review. Psychological Bulletin 134, 427–59.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pierce, A. E. (1992). The acquisition of passives in Spanish and the question of A-chain maturation. Language Acquisition 2, 55–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poupynin, Y. A. (1996). Central and peripheral connections between aspect and voice in Russian. Folia Linguistica 30, 129–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prat-Sala, M. & Branigan, H. P. (2000). Discourse constraints on syntactic processing in language production: A cross-linguistic study in English and Spanish. Journal of Memory and Language 42, 168–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Savage, C., Lieven, E., Theakston, A. & Tomasello, M. (2003). Testing the abstractness of children's linguistic representations: Lexical and structural priming of syntactic constructions in young children. Developmental Science 6, 557–67.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Savage, C., Lieven, E., Theakston, A. & Tomasello, M. (2006). Structural priming as implicit learning in language acquisition: The persistence of lexical and structural priming in 4-year-olds. Language Learning and Development 2, 27–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schaarschmidt, G. (1971). Passive and pseudo-passive constructions in Russian. Scando-Slavica 17, 141–60.Google Scholar
Schaarschmidt, G. (1979). A natural learning sequence: Passives and participles in Russian. Russkii Yazyk [Russian Language Journal] 33, 6–18.Google Scholar
Shibatani, M. (1985). Passives and related constructions: A prototype analysis. Language 61, 821–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shimpi, P., Gámez, P., Huttenlocher, J. & Vasilyeva, M. (2007). Syntactic priming in 3- and 4-year-old children: Evidence for abstract representations of transitive and dative forms. Developmental Psychology 43, 1334–46.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Thothathiri, M. & Snedeker, J. (2008). Syntactic priming during language comprehension in three- and four-year-old children. Journal of Memory and Language 58, 188–213.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vasilyeva, M., Waterfall, H. & Huttenlocher, J. (2006). Effects of language intervention on syntactic skill levels in preschoolers. Developmental Psychology 42, 164–74.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Vinnitskaya, I. & Wexler, K. (2001). The role of pragmatics in the development of Russian aspect. First Language 21, 143–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zavitnevich, O. (2005). On Wh-movement and the nature of Wh-phrases. Skase Journal of Theoretical Linguistics 2, 75–100.Google Scholar
Zolotova, G. A. (1982). Kommunikativnye aspekty russkogo sintaksisa [Communicative aspects of Russian syntax]. Moscow: Nauka.Google Scholar
Zolotova, G. A., Onipenko, N. K. & Sidorova, M. I. (1998). Kommunikativnaia gramática russkogo iazyka [Communcative grammar for the Russian language]. Moskcow: RAN.Google Scholar