Priming Effects in Combinatory Categorial Grammar

Proceedings of the 2006 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2006), pages 308–316, Sydney, July 2006. c⃝2006 Association for Computational Linguistics Priming Effects in Combinatory Categorial Grammar David Reitter School of Informatics University of Edinburgh 2 Buccleuch Place Edinburgh EH8 9LW, UK dreitter@inf.ed.ac.uk Julia Hockenmaier Inst. for Res. in Cognitive Science University of Pennsylvania 3401 Walnut Street Philadelphia PA 19104, USA juliahr@cis.upenn.edu Frank Keller School of Informatics University of Edinburgh 2 Buccleuch Place Edinburgh EH8 9LW, UK keller@inf.ed.ac.uk Abstract This paper presents a corpus-based ac- count of structural priming in human sen- tence processing, focusing on the role that syntactic representations play in such an account. We estimate the strength of struc- tural priming effects from a corpus of spontaneous spoken dialogue, annotated syntactically with Combinatory Catego- rial Grammar (CCG) derivations. This methodology allows us to test a range of predictions that CCG makes about prim- ing. In particular, we present evidence for priming between lexical and syntactic categories encoding partially satisfied sub- categorization frames, and we show that priming effects exist both for incremental and normal-form CCG derivations. 1 Introduction In psycholinguistics, priming refers to the fact that speakers prefer to reuse recently encountered lin- guistic material. Priming effects typically man- ifest themselves in shorter processing times or higher usage frequencies for reused material com- pared to non-reused material. These effects are at- tested both in language comprehension and in lan- guage production. Structural priming occurs when a speaker repeats a syntactic decision, and has been demonstrated in numerous experiments over the past two decades (e.g., Bock, 1986; Branigan et al., 2000). These experimental findings show that subjects are more likely to choose, e.g., a passive voice construction if they have previously comprehended or produced such a construction. Recent studies have used syntactically anno- tated corpora to investigate structural priming. The results have demonstrated the existence of priming effects in corpus data: they occur for spe- cific syntactic constructions (Gries, 2005; Szm- recsanyi, 2005), consistent with the experimen- tal literature, but also generalize to syntactic rules across the board, which repeated more often than expected by chance (Reitter et al., 2006b; Dubey et al., 2006). In the present paper, we build on this corpus-based approach to priming, but focus on the role of the underlying syntactic represen- tations. In particular, we use priming to evaluate claims resulting from a particular syntactic theory, which is a way of testing the representational as- sumptions it makes. Using priming effects to inform syntactic the- ory is a novel idea; previous corpus-based priming studies have simply worked with uncontroversial classes of constructions (e.g., passive/active). The contribution of this paper is to overcome this limi- tation by defining a computational model of prim- ing with a clear interface to a particular syntac- tic framework. The general assumption we make is that priming is a phenomenon relating to gram- matical constituents – these constituents determine the syntactic choices whose repetition can lead to priming. Crucially, grammatical frameworks dif- fer in the grammatical …

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