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Structural Priming in Narrative Contexts: Evidence from EEG
Poster Session C, Thursday, October 1, 10:45 am - 12:45 pm, Wangari Maathai
Irina Guliaeva1, Agnieszka Konopka1, Arabella Sinclair2, Anastasia Klimovich-Gray1; 1University of Aberdeen, 2University College London
Recent exposure to a syntactic structure increases use of that structure in production (Bock, 1986) and facilitates processing of subsequent structurally similar sentences in comprehension (Pickering & Ferreira, 2008). This is known as structural priming - a classic effect used to evaluate real-time structure learning and adaptive structural prediction generation during comprehension. While structural priming has been demonstrated in isolated target sentences after one or multiple semantically unrelated primes (e.g. Pickering et al., 2013), it remains unclear if priming persists in coherent and natural narrative contexts. Given that language comprehension “in the wild” typically happens in larger naturalistic discourse, tracking structural priming effects in longer texts is critical for understanding whether and how context shapes structural learning and structural prediction. Our aim is, therefore, to investigate whether structural priming occurs during naturalistic reading of simple narratives and to identify its neural substrates. We present preliminary data from 22 native English speakers (mean age = 23.86, 7 male, 15 female) who read 80 short narratives (7 sentences each) while EEG and eye movements were simultaneously recorded. Each narrative contained three dative (double object [DO] or prepositional object [PO]) primes and one dative target, which either matched (Primed) the preceding primes or did not (Unprimed). Primes were interleaved with filler sentences (3 per story) to maintain naturalness and discourse coherence. A pre-test norming on 76 participants indicated high perceived coherence of the narratives (M=4.97 out of 6, SD=0.26). Analyses focused on the first (NP1) and second (NP2) post-verbal noun phrases in the dative target sentences. NP1 represents the earliest region with constrained structural expectations, and NP2 can be treated as a disambiguating region for the target structure. Neural data were aligned to the onset of fixations to NP1 and NP2 in the targets. Whole-scalp spatio-temporal cluster-based permutation analyses contrasting primed and unprimed targets in the EEG data showed significant cumulative priming effects only in PO targets. Specifically, at NP2, primed and unprimed PO targets differed at the centro-posterior cluster in the 100-420 ms temporal window following word onset. No reliable clusters were observed for primed and unprimed DO targets. Analyses restricted to electrode regions taken from a recent priming study (Sinclair et al., 2026), which used non-contextualised prime-target sentence pairs, did not show any significant effects. These preliminary results are the first to show that structural priming is observed in longer semantically rich narratives, with neural signals capturing structural learning and predictions during natural narrative reading. However, these effects differ qualitatively from those previously reported in semantically isolated sentences, both in temporal and spatial characteristics. Furthermore, such effects did not generalise across both dative forms but were strongest for the less cognitively demanding prepositional dative structure. Overall, we suggest that broader discourse dynamically modulates structural predictions during connective narrative structure comprehension.
Topic Areas: Reading, Syntax and Combinatorial Semantics