THE REPRESENTATION OF VERBS - EVIDENCE FROM SYNTACTIC PRIMING IN LANGUAGE PRODUCTION

We report five experiments that investigate syntactic priming (Bock, 1 986b) using a written completion task. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that priming occurs if the prime and target contain different verbs, but t hat stronger priming occurs if the verb is repeated. Experiment 1 also showed that priming occurs even if the detailed structure of prime an d target differ. Experiments 3, 4, and 5 found that priming was unaffe cted by whether tense, aspect, or number of the verb stayed the same o r differed between prime and target. We argue that these results provi de evidence about the representation of syntactic information within t he lemma stratum. We use these results to extend the model proposed by Roelofs (1992, 1993). In particular, we argue that combinatorial info rmation is phrasal in nature, is associated with the verb's lemma rath er than a particular form of the verb, and is shared between different lemmas. (C) 1998 Academic Press.