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BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article

Front. Lang. Sci.
Sec. Language Processing
Volume 3 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/flang.2024.1462269

The lexical boost effect is stronger in main clauses than in subordinate clauses

Provisionally accepted
Rianne van Lieburg Rianne van Lieburg *Sarah Bernolet Sarah Bernolet
  • University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Structural priming effects are stronger if there is lexical overlap between prime and target, the socalled lexical boost effect to structural priming (Pickering & Branigan, 1998). While abstract structural priming is long-lasting and seems to reflect implicit learning, the lexical boost effect decays quickly and might be induced by residual activation or explicit memory (Hartsuiker et al. 2008). Recently, Kantola et al. ( 2023) only found a lexical boost effect in ditransitive structures in subordinate clauses when the head verb in the subordinate clause rather than the matrix head verb was repeated between prime and target. We report an experiment in which the lexical boost effect is weaker in subordinate clauses than in main clauses when repeating the head verb. Our findings suggest that the lexical boost effect caused by repeating head verbs can be disrupted due to an increased amount of interfering material.

    Keywords: structural priming, lexical boost effect, Residual activation, explicit memory, Language production

    Received: 09 Jul 2024; Accepted: 09 Dec 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 van Lieburg and Bernolet. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Rianne van Lieburg, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium

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