316 • CHAPTER 11 Language
syntactic priming—hearing a statement with a particular syntactic construction increases
the chances that a sentence will be produced with the same construction. Syntactic priming
is important because it can lead people to coordinate the grammatical form of their state-
ments during a conversation. Holly Branigan and coworkers (2000) illustrated syntactic
priming by using the following procedure to set up a give-and-take between two people.METHOD Syntactic Priming
In a syntactic priming experiment, two people engage in a conversation, and the experimenter
determines whether production of a specifi c grammatical construction by one person increases
the chances that the same construction will be used by the other person.
Participants in Branigan’s experiment were told that the experiment was about how people
communicate when they can’t see each other. They thought they were working with another
participant who was on the other side of a screen (the person on the left in ● Figure 11.15a).(a)(b)Confederate reads statement.Confederate listeningParticipant picks matching
card that matches statement.Participant picks response
card and describes picture
to confederate.Response cardsThe girl gave
the boy a book.The father brought
his daughter a present.Matching cards●FIGURE 11.15 The Branigan et al.
(2000) experiment. (a) The participant,
on the right, picks, from the cards
laid out on the table, a card with a
picture that matches the statement
read by the confederate. (b) The
participant then picks a card from the
pile of response cards on the left and
describes the picture on the response
card to the confederate. (Source: Based
on H. P. Branigan, M. J. Pickering, & A. A. Cleland,
“Syntactic Co-ordination in Dialogue,” Cognition,
75, B13–B25, 2000.)Copyright 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.