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Syntactic Priming in Language Acquisition: Representations, mechanisms and applications
Edited by Katherine Messenger
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 31] 2022
► pp. 83–106

Chapter 5
Sticking to what we know

Methodological limitations to generalizability

| University of Toronto
The ultimate goal of research is to generate and test broad theories that account for a wide range of scenarios. Conclusions at this level, however, are only valid if they are based on heterogenous data. This chapter reviews the limitations in child syntactic priming methodologies that do not allow generalization. Specifically, the set of structures that has been examined is small and most studies have tested priming effects using production tasks. The chapter concludes with an experiment that addresses both of these issues by using a comprehension methodology to investigate the priming of children’s prepositional phrase attachment preferences.
Keywords: production priming, comprehension priming, PP-attachment, long term priming, implicit learning, transient activation, active vs. passive, dative alternation, verb bias, variability of structures, ambiguous relative clauses, global ambiguity
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Lack of structural variability
  • 3.Lack of comprehension priming studies
  • 4.Addressing both concerns: PP-attachment priming study
    • Participants
    • Materials
    • Procedure
    • Results
      • Control group
      • Experimental groups
    • Discussion
  • 5.Additional limitations
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 29 September 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.31.05atk
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