Dual Mechanism Priming Effects in Hindi Word Order

Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 936–953 November 20–23, 2022. ©2022 Association for Computational Linguistics 936 Dual Mechanism Priming Effects in Hindi Word Order Sidharth Ranjan IIT Delhi sidharth.ranjan03@gmail.com Marten van Schijndel Cornell University mv443@cornell.edu Sumeet Agarwal IIT Delhi sumeet@iitd.ac.in Rajakrishnan Rajkumar IISER Bhopal rajak@iiserb.ac.in Abstract Word order choices during sentence produc- tion can be primed by preceding sentences. In this work, we test the DUAL MECHANISM hy- pothesis that priming is driven by multiple dif- ferent sources. Using a Hindi corpus of text productions, we model lexical priming with an n-gram cache model and we capture more abstract syntactic priming with an adaptive neu- ral language model. We permute the preverbal constituents of corpus sentences, and then use a logistic regression model to predict which sen- tences actually occurred in the corpus against artificially generated meaning-equivalent vari- ants. Our results indicate that lexical priming and lexically-independent syntactic priming af- fect complementary sets of verb classes. By showing that different priming influences are separable from one another, our results support the hypothesis that multiple different cognitive mechanisms underlie priming. 1 Introduction Gries (2005) defines syntactic priming as the ten- dency of speakers “to repeat syntactic structures they have just encountered (produced or compre- hended) before”. Starting with Bock (1986), a long line of experimental and corpus-based work has provided evidence for this phenomenon in the con- text of language production (see Reitter et al., 2011, for a through review). More recently, comprehen- sion studies have also attested priming effects in a wide variety of languages (Arai et al., 2007; Too- ley and Traxler, 2010), where prior experience of a syntactic structure alleviates the comprehension difficulty associated with subsequent similar syn- tactic structures during reading. The experimental record also demonstrates that lexical repetition af- fects syntactic priming (Reitter et al., 2011, and references therein). According to the DUAL MECH- ANISM ACCOUNT proposed by Tooley and Traxler (2010), lexically independent syntactic priming effects are caused by an implicit learning mecha- nism (Bock and Griffin, 2000; Chang et al., 2006), whereas lexically dependent priming effects are caused by a more short-term mechanism, such as residual activation (Pickering and Branigan, 1998). In the present work, we test this hypothesis of a dual mechanism of priming by analyzing whether different kinds of intersentential priming can ac- count for the word order of different constructions in Hindi. Our main contribution is that we deploy precisely defined quantitative cognitive factors in our statistical models along with minimally paired alternative productions, whereas most previous ex- perimental and corpus studies on priming only em- ploy one or the other. Hindi has a flexible word order, though SOV is the canonical order (Kachru, 2006). To investi- gate constituent ordering preferences, we generate meaning-equivalent grammatical variants of Hindi sentences by linearizing preverbal constituents of projective dependency trees of the Hindi-Urdu Treebank corpus (HUTB; Bhatt et al., 2009) …

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