Jabberwocky priming

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that occur in them, both with high frequency and with markedly lower frequency. It hasbeen argued that associative priming is a type of semantic priming (McRae & Boisvert,1998). In fact, Thompson-Schill et al. (1998) found that associates only show priming ifthey are in fact semantically related. It is left for future work to determine conclusivelywhether semantically related non-associates are primed by constructions since the presentevidence was mixed on this point: priming was significant by-subjects but not by-items.In any case, it is sufficient to note that each construction primed associatedmeaningful words. If, for example, the ditransitive makes one activate give, then thisprovides a cue to interpretation. In fact it has been argued that words “have” meaning inmuch this way: they serve as cues that combine to direct a comprehender to aninterpretation (Elman, 2009). The automatic nature of the task indicates thatconstructions provide cues to interpretation in real-time.The present results do not speak to the question of whether argument structureconstructions are necessarily phrasal or whether they may be conceived of as lexicaltemplates (Hovav and Levin 1998; Mueller 2006). But the present work providesevidence that they are not exclusively tethered to particular verbs: meaningful argumentstructure constructions are evoked even by Jabberwocky sentences.ConclusionThere is a growing trend toward distinguishing a verb’s inherent or “core” lexicalsemantics from the semantics associated with the grammatical structures in which theverb can occur (Goldberg, 1992, 1995; Jackendoff, 1997; Rappaport Hovav & Levin,1998). At the same time, there is also much work that presupposes that all meaning comes
from the lexicon. The present findings indicate that phrasal abstract constructions areassociated with semantics even when they contain no open class lexical items, and thatthe meaning is accessed automatically. Constructions prime not only main verbs withwhich they regularly occur, but they also prime main verbs that are low-frequencyassociates, and may even prime semantically related non-associates in some cases. Thisevidence of semantic priming indicates a tight link between syntax and semantics in thedomain of argument structure. That is, argument structure constructions are associatedwith meanings. In this way, Alice was right when she noticed that the sentences ofJabberwocky “filled her head with ideas.”
Page 1 and 2: Evidence for Automatic Accessing of
Page 3 and 4: will likely begin a discussion of s
Page 5 and 6: Bencini & Goldberg (2000) conducted
Page 7 and 8: despite the fact that helping with
Page 9 and 10: high frequency associates and lower
Page 11 and 12: ProcedureParticipants performed lex
Page 13 and 14: Figure 1: Basic structure for a pri
Page 15 and 16: Again, the same target words were u
Page 17 and 18: Figure 2: Reaction times for congru
Page 19: priming is well-known to be weaker
Page 23 and 24: Goldberg, A. E. (2010). Verbs, Fram
Page 25: Yamada, Y., and Neville, H.J. 2007.

Jabberwocky priming

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