Results from traditional assessment measures used with Spanish-English bilingual children may not be representative of this population’s morphosyntactic abilities due to their dynamic proficiencies. Short-term learning tasks such as structural priming may provide more comprehensive information on bilingual children’s morphosyntactic abilities. The purpose of this thesis was to analyze items from the experimental version of the Bilingual English Spanish Assessment-Middle Extension (BESA-ME) in order to select appropriate item types to be used on a structural priming task. The Experimental BESA-ME was administered to 137 children with typical development and 37 children with language impairment between the ages of 7;0 to 9;11. Results revealed that appropriate items for a structural priming task were third-person singular, past tense, and possessives in English, and conditionals, subjunctives, and direct object clitics in Spanish. Depending on the purpose of the structural priming tasks, additional items also showed potential for use. / text

<div>Background: Structural priming – a tendency to reuse previously encountered sentence structures – has been shown to facilitate production of sentences in persons with aphasia (PWA). However, the task-specific and person-specific factors that modulate the strength of priming effects in PWA remain largely unknown. This study examined (a) if PWA and healthy older adults (HOA) demonstrate improved production of passive sentences following comprehension of passive (as opposed to active) prime sentences, (b) whether repeated use of a verb between a prime and target sentence boosts priming effects, and (c) whether individual participants’ deficits in syntactic processing modulate degrees of priming effects.</div><div><br></div><div>Method: The participants (16 HOA and 13 PWA) completed a comprehension-to-production structural priming task. For prime sentences, they completed a sentence-to-picture matching comprehension task. Then, they described a target action picture, which could be described in an active or passive sentence structure. For half of the prime-target pairs, the verb was repeated to compare the priming effects in the same vs. different verb prime conditions (i.e., lexical boost). To analyze individual variability, we examined if PWA’s scores on clinical measures of syntactic comprehension and production were associated with a positive priming effect.</div><div><br></div><div>Results: Both HOA and PWA showed increased production of passive sentences following comprehension of passive primes, although the priming effect was reduced for PWA. A significant lexical boost was found in HOA, but not for PWA. Within PWA, individuals with higher scores on clinical measures of syntactic production, but not syntactic comprehension, showed a significant priming effect.</div><div><br></div><div>Conclusion: The findings suggest that implicit comprehension-to-production structural priming is preserved in aphasia and that lexically-mediated structural priming may not be critical to effectiveness of structural priming in aphasia. Preliminary results indicate that individuals’ syntactic skills in the domain of production may need to be considered when comprehension-to-production priming is used to improve sentence production.</div>

<p><strong>Background: </strong>Many persons with aphasia (PWA) show deficits in sentence production and comprehension which are, in part, attributed to an inefficient mapping between messages and syntactic structures. Structural priming—the tendency to repeat a previously encountered sentence structure—has been shown to support implicit syntactic learning within and across production and comprehension modalities in healthy adults. Structural priming is effective in facilitating the production or comprehension of sentences in PWA. However, less is known about whether priming in one modality changes PWA’s performance in the other modality, which is crucial evidence needed for developing structural priming as a cost-effective intervention strategy in aphasia.</p> <p><strong>Aims</strong>: This study examined (a) whether production to comprehension cross-modality priming is effective in PWA, (b) whether priming-induced changes in syntactic comprehension lasted even in the absence of an immediate prime, and (c) whether there is a significant correlation between individuals’ priming effects and the change in their comprehension following priming.</p> <p><strong>Methods & Procedures: </strong>Thirteen PWA and 13 age-matched control participants completed a training study comprised of three phases: a pre-test, a production-to-comprehension priming block, and a post-test. In the pre- and post-tests, participants completed a sentence-picture matching task with sentences involving interpretations of an ambiguous prepositional phrase (e.g., The teacher is poking the monk <u>with a bat</u>). Participants were free to choose a picture corresponding to a high attachment (HA; e.g., the teacher is using the bat to poke the monk) or a low attachment (LA; e.g., the monk is the one holding the bat) interpretation. In the priming block, participants produced LA sentences as prime and then completed a sentence-picture matching task for comprehension targets, similar to the pre-test. </p> <p><strong>Results</strong>: Age-matched controls and PWA showed a significant priming effect when comparing the priming block to the pre-test. In both groups, the priming effect persisted when comparing picture selections in the pre- and post-tests. At the individual level, age-matched controls who showed larger priming effects also selected more LA pictures in the post-test compared to the pre-test, indicating that the priming effect accounted for the magnitude of change from the pre- to post-test. This correlation was also found in PWA.</p> <p><strong>Conclusion</strong>: The findings of this study suggest that production-to-comprehension cross-modality priming is effective and persistent in PWA and controls, in line with the view that structural priming is a form of implicit learning. Further, the findings support sentence processing models that suggest syntactic representations are shared between production and comprehension, and therefore, production influences future comprehension. Cross-modality priming from production to comprehension has clinical potential to improve sentence processing in PWA. </p>

This study addresses the question of the mental representation and processing of language by investigating &ldquo / structural priming&rdquo / in Turkish Genitive-Possessive (GEN-POSS) constructions. Structural priming is the facilitating effect of having already experienced a structural form on its subsequent processing. We investigate this phenomenon on a construction pair in Turkish, which shares the same external GEN-POSS morpho-syntactic template despite having distinct grammatical categories. The structures under scrutiny are possessive noun phrases (e.g. &ldquo / Korsan, [prenses-in(GEN) &ouml / yk&uuml / -s&uuml / n(POSS.3SG)]-&uuml / hatirladi.&rdquo / which means: The pirate remembered [the princess&rsquo / s story].) and embedded noun clauses with nominalized verbs as predicates (e.g. &ldquo / Korsan, [prenses-in(GEN) g&uuml / l-d&uuml / g(VN)-&uuml / n(POSS.3SG)]-&uuml / hatirladi.&rdquo / which means: The pirate remembered [that the princess (had) laughed/was laughing].) The results of the study which consists of a series of production and comprehension experiments with various methodologies (written sentence completion, self-paced reading and eye-tracking) indicate that structural priming might access the morphosyntactic level of representation in Turkish. Priming seems sensitive to the distinction between the phrasal vs. clausal nature of structures. During the processing of GEN-POSS constructions, the grammatical information regarding the constituents is accessed. Complex forms are further decomposed if processing resources are available. Overall, language production and comprehension seem to operate on the same structural representations but through different mechanisms. In addition, the study also contributes to the understanding of structural priming as a methodological paradigm and to the establishment of a bridge between the processing and theoretical linguistic analysis of Turkish nominalized verbs. To conclude, this study pioneers in exploring structural priming in Turkish and opens way to future research in this line.

<p><i>Purpose</i>. Sentence production is impaired in many persons with aphasia (PWA). Structural priming, a speaker’s tendency to re-use a previously heard sentence structure, has been shown to facilitate sentence production in PWA. Man et al. (2019), however, found that PWA showed significant priming only in transitive sentences but not in dative sentences when these two different types of sentences were presented in an alternating manner within a session [Man, G., Meehan, S., Martin, N., Branigan, H., Lee, J. (2019). Effects of Verb Overlap on Structural Priming in Dialogue: Implications for Syntactic Learning in Aphasia. <i>Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 62</i>, 1933-1950]. This study sought to examine whether presenting transitive vs. dative stimuli in a blocked format would yield more consistent priming effects in PWA.</p><p><i>Methods. </i>Twelve PWA and twelve healthy older adults (HOA) completed a dialogue-like priming task, where participants took turns describing pictures with the experimenter. Importantly, each participant received two blocks of transitive and dative priming. In addition, we repeated verbs between prime and target items for half of each block to test if lexical overlap boosts priming, i.e., lexical boost. We measured how often the participant re-used the same syntactic structure they heard the experimenter produce previously when they described their own picture. </p><p><i>Results. </i>HOA showed significant priming and lexical boost in the transitive block and significant priming in the dative block, replicating Man et al. (2019). PWA, showed near significant priming in the transitive block. Importantly, the priming effect became significant when the verb was repeated between prime and target, indicating lexical boost. However, PWA failed to show priming in the dative block. </p><p><i>Discussion.</i> Using a blocked stimulus design only modulated lexically-mediated priming in transitives for PWA, different from Man et al. (2019). Findings suggest that while it is feasible to use structural priming to ameliorate sentence production deficits in PWA, the presentation of target stimuli would likely not influence outcomes.</p><p></p><p></p>

Limited information exists regarding the acquisition of syntax and morphology in young Spanish-English bilingual language learners. A method to measure short-term language learning is through structural priming; an auditory model of the target structure is presented, which influences a subject’s subsequent production. The purpose of this thesis was to develop and pilot priming tasks in both English and Spanish to analyze the language production of typically developing bilingual elementary school students. The morphosyntactic structures targeted in the structural priming task included the third person singular and past tense in English, as well as direct object clitics and imperfect tense in Spanish. The study included three participants, aged 4;7, 6;7, and 10;11. Results revealed that bilingual elementary students with varied language exposure are influenced and learn from morphosyntactic priming. / text