Schoot, L. 1 , Hagoort, P. . 1, 2 & Segaert, K. . 3, 1
1 Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
2 Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
3 University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK
Speakers tend to repeat sentence structure, a phenomenon called structural persistence or syntactic priming (SP). SP has been explained by implicit learning accounts. In two experiments, we show that on top of that, speakers are sensitive to social cues; their own SP magnitude increases when their partner is strongly primed by them.
Participants played a picture description game with a partner. Speakers produced active or passive descriptions (targets) after listening to an active, passive or intransitive description by their partner (primes). We measure SP magnitude in two ways.
Experiment 1: SP magnitude measured in syntactic choices (increase in percentage passives following passive prime relative to intransitive baseline). Partner was a scripted confederate who was non-adaptive or adaptive to the participant's syntactic choices. Participants' SP magnitude increased with an adaptive but decreased with a non-adaptive partner.
Experiment 2: SP magnitude measured in speech onset latencies (faster for repeated syntax). Two naive participants described photographs color-coded to determine the syntactic structure used. Relative to their (previously measured) individual SP magnitude, speakers adapted towards their partner's SP magnitude.
These results reflect the top-down influence of being in a social context on implicit learning reflected in SP; speakers influence each other's SP magnitude.