Abstract: Starting from the seminal work in 1980s to more recent findings, literature review suggests grammatical priming to be an elusive fenomenon, reliably obtained mostly in a lexical decision task and only rarely in naming task. Prevalent conclusion derived from the aforementioned fact suggests the effects of grammatical priming to be of less importance for online word processing as reflected by naming. However, this goes against intuitive notion of grammatical information being especially valuable in processing richly-inflected, free-word ordered language such as Serbian. The conclusion was challenged in a naming task in which prepositions and personal pronouns were employed to prime target nouns and verbs. We also tested the effect of prime-target asynchrony at 600ms and 250ms intervals, as the variable is known to invertly influence effects of language priming. Delayed naming condition was used to provide a purer estimate of target processing time afforded at the two asynchrony intervals in online naming. Analyses suggest effects of grammatical priming to be both substantial and robust. The facilitation of 22 ms (25 ms at 600 ms asynchrony, 20 ms at 250 ms asynchrony) provided by grammatical information was roughly twice as large as obtained in comparable studies in English. The facilitation effect was not qualified by interaction with SOA and therefore should not be attributed to some major strategic process associated with the longer SOA. We conclude grammatical priming in naming to be possible, at least in case of richly-inflected, free word-ordered language, and more than one word class primed. Online-delayed average latencies difference indicated slightly wider time window for target processing at the shorter asynchrony. The fact requires caution in grammatical priming effects loci interpretation.

Keywords: grammatical priming; word naming.

ACM Classification Keywords: I.2 Artificial Intelligence; I.2.7 Natural Language Processing – Language parsing and understanding.

Link:

GRAMMATICAL PRIMING DOES FACILITATE VISUAL WORD NAMING, AT LEAST IN SERBIAN

Dejan Lalović

http://www.foibg.com/ijitk/ijitk-vol04/ijitk04-3-p01.pdf