Syntactic Priming: Is Shared Semantic Content an Obligation?

Syntactic priming has been suggested to be an efficient paradigm in studying mental language representations. However, further research is needed to explore the underlying mechanisms. Recently it is suggested that argument-based constructions are present at both the syntactic and discourse levels of representation predicting that priming effect does not occur in the absence of shared semantic content. The study used a pre-test and post-test approach within a quasi-experimental design to investigate whether sentences with no shared semantic content, but similar syntactic structure, could prime one another in L۲ written production tasks. Ninety students at the University of Tabriz participated in the study and were divided into intermediate or upper-intermediate groups based on their proficiency test performance. Both groups narrated a silent movie in the pre-treatment phase. In the treatment phase, the participants were primed with motion phrasal verbs by reading and rating a booklet including pictures followed by phrasal motion verbs describing them. Immediately afterward, they were required to narrate a silent movie. It was hypothesized that if semantically unrelated structures could prime one another as is supported by some reported findings, priming participants with motion phrasal verbs would boost non-motion phrasal verb usage in the treatment phase. However, the authors failed to find a significant difference between the performance of participants in the pre-treatment vs. post-treatment phase. The findings support the claim that syntactic similarity is not sufficient to trigger structural priming, and shared semantics seems to be required, and are justified with regard to semantic roles and compositional vs. non-compositional meaning.