Ombiguity: the effects of priming a structure on the subsequent processing of a different structure

Abstract

This experiment aims at finding an influence of syntactic priming on sentence processing. It uses locally ambiguous sentences with a late disambiguation. Semantically and syntactically there are no big differences between sentences. The processing of these sentences is measured by recording the reading time of the target sentences. These target sentences are constructed with the syntactically ambiguous word om either as preposition or as complementizer. Three kinds of primes were used: The same structure, the competing structure or none of the two structures (no prime). The recorded reading times of the different target sentences resulted in no significant differences for the different types of prime. This makes it impossible to draw conclusions with respect to my predictions. It is suggested that (a) more participants be included in a next experiment, and that (b) the materials be more carefully checked for acceptability (and plausibility).