Structural priming and the phrasal/clausal distinction: the case of concealed questions

Abstract

This paper investigates whether structural priming is sensitive to the phrasal vs. clausal nature of the constructions it tests. To that end, we examine NPs that receive a question-like interpretation when embedded under certain predicates. These NPs are known as “concealed question (CQ) NPs ”. We first report the results of a pilot study that establishes co-occurrence patterns of the target embedding predicates. We then present two structural priming studies which test CQ NPs with “overt embedded questions ”: “embedded wh-questions ” and “embedded declaratives ”. Both written sentence completion tasks demonstrate structural priming, which turns out to be sensitive to the phrase-clause distinction. Results: