The connectionist model theory Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

The connectionist model theory - Essay Example In Experiment 2, the prime–target pairs had different main verbs. Facilitated target sentence processing was observed in both Experiments 1 and 2 when the target sentences were preceded by a prime sentence with the same syntactic structure. These results provide the first evidence of lexically independent, between-sentence structural priming in online sentence comprehension. Abstract: Strong evidence suggests that prior syntactic context affects language production (e.g., J. K. Bock, 1986). The authors report 4 experiments that used an expression–picture matching task to investigate whether it also affects ambiguity resolution in comprehension. All experiments examined the interpretation of prepositional phrases that were ambiguous between high and low attachment. After reading a prime expression with a high-attached interpretation, participants tended to interpret an ambiguous prepositional phrase in a target expression as highly attached if it contained the same verb as the prime (Experiment 1), but not if it contained a different verb (Experiment 2). They also tended to adopt the high-attached interpretation after producing a prime with the high-attached interpretation that included the same verb (Experiment 3). Finally, they were faster to adopt a high-attached interpretation after reading an expression containing the same verb that was disambiguated to the high-attached versus the low-attached interpretation (Experiment 4). Attachment during Comprehension.† Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition. 2005. Vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 468-481. 16 February 2011