How do people produce ungrammatical utterances? (original) (raw)

2012, Journal of Memory and Language

We investigate whether people might come to produce utterances that they regard as ungrammatical by examining the production of ungrammatical verb-construction combinations (e.g., The dancer donates the soldier the apple) after exposure to both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. We contrast two accounts of how such production might take place: an abstract structural persistence account, according to which it is caused by increased activation of an abstract structural rule; and a lexically-driven persistence account, according to which it requires previous exposure to the same (ungrammatical) verb-construction combination. In four structural priming experiments, we found that sentences with ungrammatical verb-construction combinations were produced only after exposure to similar ungrammatical exemplars containing the same verb, but not after such sentences with a different verb, or grammatical sentences with the same construction. These results indicate that people can produce sentences with ungrammatical verb-construction combinations after brief exposure to related sentences, and provide support for the lexically-driven persistence account of such production.

Sign up for access to the world's latest research.

checkGet notified about relevant papers

checkSave papers to use in your research

checkJoin the discussion with peers

checkTrack your impact