Article contents
Horses for courses: When acceptability judgments are more suitable than structural priming (and vice versa)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 November 2017
Abstract
Although structural priming is often the most suitable paradigm, it sometimes misses effects that are detected by more sensitive acceptability-judgment tasks, thus yielding incorrect conclusions. For example, Branigan & Pickering's (B&P's) claim that “syntactic representations do not contain semantic information” (sect. 2.1, para. 2), while supported by structural-priming studies of the passive, is undermined by an acceptability-judgment study of this construction.
- Type
- Open Peer Commentary
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017
References
Ambridge, B., Bidgood, A., Pine, J. M., Rowland, C. F. & Freudenthal, D. (2016) Is passive syntax semantically constrained? Evidence from adult grammaticality judgment and comprehension studies. Cognitive Science
40(6):1435–59. doi: 10.1111/cogs.12277.Google Scholar
Messenger, K., Branigan, H. P. & McLean, J. F. (2012a) Is children's acquisition of the passive a staged process? Evidence from six- and nine-year-olds' production of passives. Journal of Child Language
39(5):991–1016.Google Scholar
Messenger, K., Branigan, H. P., McLean, J. F. & Sorace, A. (2012b) Is young children's passive syntax semantically constrained? Evidence from syntactic priming. Journal of Memory and Language
66(4):568–87. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2012.03.008.Google Scholar
Pinker, S., Lebeaux, D. S. & Frost, L. A. (1987) Productivity and constraints in the acquisition of the passive. Cognition
26(3):195–267.Google Scholar
- 2
- Cited by
Target article
An experimental approach to linguistic representation
Related commentaries (30)
A usage-based cognitive linguistic (re-)interpretation of priming evidence
Acceptability judgments still matter: Deafness and documentation
Action sequences instead of representational levels
Can structural priming answer the important questions about language?
Considering experimental and observational evidence of priming together, syntax doesn't look so autonomous
Converging on a theory of language through multiple methods
Developmental psycholinguistics teaches us that we need multi-method, not single-method, approaches to the study of linguistic representation
Don't forget the neurobiology: An experimental approach to linguistic representation
Don't shoot the giant whose shoulders we are standing on
Horses for courses: When acceptability judgments are more suitable than structural priming (and vice versa)
If priming is graded rather than all-or-none, can reactivating abstract structures be the underlying mechanism?
Microscopic and macroscopic approaches to the mental representations of second languages
Moving beyond the priming of single-language sentences: A proposal for a comprehensive model to account for linguistic representation in bilinguals
On the nature of structure in structural priming
Priming is swell, but it's far from simple
Priming methods in semantics and pragmatics
Setting the empirical record straight: Acceptability judgments appear to be reliable, robust, and replicable
Structural priming can inform syntactic analyses of partially grammaticalized constructions
Structural priming is a useful but imperfect technique for studying all linguistic representations, including those of pragmatics
Structural priming is most useful when the conclusions are statistically robust
Structural priming is not a Royal Road to representations
Structural priming supports grammatical networks
Structural priming, action planning, and grammar
Syntactic levels, lexicalism, and ellipsis: The jury is still out
The limitations of structural priming are not the limits of linguistic theory
The logic of syntactic priming and acceptability judgments
The malleability of linguistic representations poses a challenge to the priming-based experimental approach
The relationship between priming and linguistic representations is mediated by processing constraints
The syntax of priming
What structural priming can and cannot reveal
Author response
Structural priming and the representation of language