Dual Mechanism Priming Effects in Hindi Word Order

TL;DR

This study investigates how multiple cognitive mechanisms influence priming in Hindi sentence word order, using computational models to distinguish lexical and syntactic priming effects and their impact on verb classes.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence supporting the dual mechanism hypothesis by modeling and separating lexical and syntactic priming effects in Hindi sentence production.

Findings

Lexical priming affects specific verb classes.

Syntactic priming influences different verb classes.

Priming mechanisms are separable and operate independently.

Abstract

Word order choices during sentence production can be primed by preceding sentences. In this work, we test the DUAL MECHANISM hypothesis that priming is driven by multiple different sources. Using a Hindi corpus of text productions, we model lexical priming with an n-gram cache model and we capture more abstract syntactic priming with an adaptive neural language model. We permute the preverbal constituents of corpus sentences, and then use a logistic regression model to predict which sentences actually occurred in the corpus against artificially generated meaning-equivalent variants. Our results indicate that lexical priming and lexically-independent syntactic priming affect complementary sets of verb classes. By showing that different priming influences are separable from one another, our results support the hypothesis that multiple different cognitive mechanisms underlie priming.