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A Description of Syntactic Priming

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A Description of Syntactic Priming
SYNTACTIC PRIMING
Introduction
Syntactic priming is a phenomenon where the exposure of a sentence with a particular syntactic structure can influence an individual presented the sentence with similar structure subsequently. (Pickering, M.J. & Branigan, H.P, 1995). The three components to be identified for syntactic priming are: (1) lexical priming, (2) categorization and (3) syntax. Firstly, lexical priming is dealing with the time in processing a word like manager - is believed to be lesser if the participant has been exposed to a related word like secretary; while the concept of categorization is about how the cognitive system recognizes a relationship between two stimuli, namely, an individual must be familiar with the workplace setting so as to identify that the secretary is normally an assistant to the manager; and the syntax is the rules for combining words into sentences, so that a sentence makes sense. Syntactic priming
Syntactic priming is important in sentence processing. It provides better understanding about how the mechanisms of comprehension and production work for human in acquiring language. It tells that the processor of syntactic priming employs different knowledge sources by using bottom-up processing (by visually viewing a sentence) and top-down processing (by perceptually inferring knowledge and experiences related to a sentence), as well as by analyzing the characteristics, the plausibility and the compatibility of the words, with respect to the context and punctuation used in a sentence. Syntactic priming normally occurred when sentences are syntactically identical, as to illustrate: (1) The teacher gave the student the exercise. (2) The boy showed the girl the letter. Both sentences are using the double-object prime sentence construction. Besides, syntactic priming manifests itself efficiently in many ways, for instance, an individual will read (1) faster, more fluently and more likely to produce sentence



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