Agreement groups circuits for a unified account of syntactic priming: Theory and applications

Abstract

The present paper seeks to highlight qualitative congruencies between empirical data from behavioural experiments on linguistic structural priming and insights obtained from the Agreement Groups (AG) approach, a cognitive, usage-based, distributional framework for modelling linguistic processing. Specifically, we demonstrate that a wide variety of experimental observations can be given theoretically consistent interpretation when the AG model is situated in a cognitive circuitry-architecture of nodes and connections. With the AG method, structural priming naturally emerges as a consequence of structural similarity via repeated activation of basic structural units, i.e. AGs. The analysed phenomena include structural priming of particular linguistic constructions, lexical/semantic facilitation (boost), cross-linguistic priming, anomalous utterances, and developmental aspects of structural priming. We also point out experimentally testable issues that come up along the hypothetical discussions.