Scheepers Christoph
Department of Psychology, University of Dundee, Dundee, DD1 4HN, UK.
Cognition. 2003 Oct;89(3):179-205. doi: 10.1016/s0010-0277(03)00119-7.
Three sentence completion experiments will be reported in which participants had to generate German equivalents of "the servant of the actress who..." (NP-of-NP-RC) constructions. Target fragments (which were unconstrained as to whether the relative pronoun permitted high or low attachment) were preceded by constrained prime fragments, which were either structurally congruent with the targets (Experiments 1 and 2) or structurally incongruent with the targets (anaphoric adverbial clauses rather than relative clauses (RCs), Experiment 3). While the first two experiments established reliable repetition of RC attachments between primes and targets, Experiment 3 failed to obtain a significant priming effect, indicating that RC attachment priming is dependent on a syntactic overlap between primes and targets. The results suggest a tendency of language producers to retain hierarchical syntactic relations over consecutive trials. Current models of syntactic priming in production do not offer an explanatory mechanism for this kind of observation as they presently stand.
将报告三个句子完成实验，在这些实验中，参与者必须生成德语中与“女演员的仆人，她……”（NP-of-NP-RC）结构相对应的表达。目标片段（关系代词的附着是高附着还是低附着不受限制）之前是受限的启动片段，这些启动片段要么在结构上与目标片段一致（实验1和2），要么在结构上与目标片段不一致（照应状语从句而非关系从句（RC），实验3）。虽然前两个实验确立了启动片段和目标片段之间关系从句附着的可靠重复，但实验3未能获得显著的启动效应，这表明关系从句附着启动依赖于启动片段和目标片段之间的句法重叠。结果表明，语言生成者在连续试验中倾向于保留层次句法关系。目前的句法启动生成模型就其目前的状况而言，并未为这类观察提供一种解释机制。
