How speakers sequence words and phrases remains a central question in cognitive psychology. Here we focused on understanding the representations and processes that underlie structural priming, the speaker’s tendency to repeat sentence structures encountered earlier. Verb repetition from the prime to the target led to a stronger tendency to produce locative variants of the spray-load alternation following locative primes (e.g., load the boxes into the van) than following with primes (e.g., load the van with the boxes). These structural variants had the same constituent structure, ruling out abstract syntactic structure as the source of the verb boost effect. Furthermore, using cleft constructions (e.g., What the assistant loaded into the lift was the equipment), we found that the thematic role order (thematic role-position mappings) of the prime can persist separately from its argument structure (thematic role-syntactic function mappings). Moreover, both priming effects were enhanced by verb repetition and interacted with each other when the construction of the prime was also repeated in the target. These findings are incompatible with the traditional staged model of grammatical encoding, which postulates the independence of abstract syntax from thematic role information. We propose the interactive structure-building account, according to which speakers build a sentence structure by choosing a thematic role order and argument structure interactively based on their prior co-occurrence together with other structurally relevant information such as verbs and constructions.

说话者如何对单词和短语进行排序仍然是认知心理学的核心问题。在这里，我们重点了解结构启动背后的表征和过程，即说话者重复之前遇到的句子结构的倾向。从素词到目标词的动词重复导致在方位素词后面（例如，将箱子装进货车）比在素词后面（例如，用箱子装载货车）更容易产生喷雾负载交替的方位变体。 。这些结构变体具有相同的构成结构，排除了抽象句法结构作为动词增强效果的来源。此外，使用裂开结构（例如，助理装载到电梯中的是设备），我们发现主语的主题角色顺序（主题角色-位置映射）可以与其论元结构（主题角色-句法功能）分开持续存在。映射）。此外，两种启动效应都因动词重复而增强，并且当启动词的结构也在目标中重复时相互作用。这些发现与语法编码的传统分阶段模型不相容，该模型假定抽象语法与主题角色信息的独立性。我们提出了交互式结构构建帐户，根据该帐户，说话者通过基于先前的共现以及其他结构相关信息（例如动词和结构）交互地选择主题角色顺序和论证结构来构建句子结构。