Perceptual Priming and Structural Choice in Russian Sentence Production

We report the results of a study that used perceptual priming paradigm to investigate how attentional focus on a referent influences structural choice in Russian sentence production. Experimental hypotheses were based on two previously reported findings. First, some sentence production studies using English demonstrated that perceptually priming a referent of a visual event improves its chances of assignment as the Subject of a sentence about this event and triggers the resulting choice between active and passive voice (Gleitman, et al., 2007; Tomlin, 1995, 1997). Second, a study by Ferreira (1996) showed that English speakers alternate between the structures easier and faster when they have a wider battery of structural alternatives available to them. Our data confirmed both findings with important detalization. First, Russian speakers were more likely to assign the sentential starting point but not the Subject to the perceptually primed referent alternating between the agent-initial and the patient-initial structural alternatives. This finding suggests that perceptual priming leads to the positional but not the preferential assignment of grammatical roles in Russian. Second, Russian speakers having a seemingly wider inventory of structural options than their English counterparts were more reluctant to alternate structure as a function of the perceptual prime. This tendency may result form the necessity to maintain early commitments to the case-marked noun forms, which effectively binds structural selection to a much smaller number of available alternatives than the normative grammar of Russian suggests.