The representation of verbs: Evidence from syntactic priming in language production

We report five experiments that investigate syntactic priming (Bock, 1986b) using a written completion task. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that priming occurs if the prime and target contain different verbs, but that stronger priming occurs if the verb is repeated. Experiment 1 also showed that priming occurs even if the detailed structure of prime and target differ. Experiments 3, 4, and 5 found that priming was unaffected by whether tense, aspect, or number of the verb stayed the same or differed between prime and target. We argue that these results provide evidence about the representation of syntactic information within the lemma stratum. We use these results to extend the model proposed by Roelofs (1992, 1993). In particular, we argue that combinatorial information is phrasal in nature, is associated with the verb's lemma rather than a particular form of the verb, and is shared between different lemmas. (C) 1998 Academic Press.