Parallelism in Coordination as an Instance of Syntactic Priming: Evidence from Corpus-based Modeling

Proceedings of Human Language Technology Conference and Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (HLT/EMNLP), pages 827–834, Vancouver, October 2005. c⃝2005 Association for Computational Linguistics Parallelism in Coordination as an Instance of Syntactic Priming: Evidence from Corpus-based Modeling Amit Dubey and Patrick Sturt and Frank Keller Human Communication Research Centre, Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow 2 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LW, UK {adubey,sturt,keller}@inf.ed.ac.uk Abstract Experimental research in psycholinguis- tics has demonstrated a parallelism effect in coordination: speakers are faster at pro- cessing the second conjunct of a coordi- nate structure if it has the same internal structure as the first conjunct. We show that this phenomenon can be explained by the prevalence of parallel structures in cor- pus data. We demonstrate that parallelism is not limited to coordination, but also ap- plies to arbitrary syntactic configurations, and even to documents. This indicates that the parallelism effect is an instance of a general syntactic priming mechanism in human language processing. 1 Introduction Experimental work in psycholinguistics has pro- vided evidence for the so-called parallelism prefer- ence effect: speakers processes coordinated struc- tures more quickly when the two conjuncts have the same internal syntactic structure. The processing advantage for parallel structures has been demon- strated for a range coordinate constructions, includ- ing NP coordination (Frazier et al., 2000), sentence coordination (Frazier et al., 1984), and gapping and ellipsis (Carlson, 2002; Mauner et al., 1995). The parallelism preference in NP coordination can be illustrated using Frazier et al.’s (2000) Exper- iment 3, which recorded subjects’ eye-movements while they read sentences like (1): (1) a. Terry wrote a long novel and a short poem during her sabbatical. b. Terry wrote a novel and a short poem dur- ing her sabbatical Total reading times for the underlined region were faster in (1-a), where short poem is coordinated with a syntactically parallel noun phrase (a long novel), compared to (1-b), where it is coordinated with a syntactically non-parallel phrase. These results raise an important question that the present paper tries to answer through corpus-based modeling studies: what is the mechanism underlying the parallelism preference? One hypothesis is that the effect is caused by low-level processes such as syntactic priming, i.e., the tendency to repeat syntac- tic structures (e.g., Bock, 1986). Priming is a very general mechanism that can affect a wide range of linguistic units, including words, constituents, and semantic concepts. If the parallelism effect is an in- stance of syntactic priming, then we expect it to ap- ply to a wide range of syntactic construction, and both within and between sentences. Previous work has demonstrated priming effects in corpora (Gries, 2005; Szmrecsanyi, 2005); however, these results are limited to instances of priming that involve a choice between two structural alternatives (e.g., da- tive alternation). In order to study the parallelism ef- fect, we need to model priming as general syntac- tic repetition (independent of the structural choices available). This is what the present paper attempts. Frazier and Clifton (2001) propose an alternative account of …

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