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If priming is graded rather than all-or-none, can reactivating abstract structures be the underlying mechanism?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2017

Laurie Beth Feldman  and
Petar Milin
Laurie Beth Feldman
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, State University of New York at Albany, Albany, NY 12222. lfeldman@albany.edu
Petar Milin
Affiliation:
Department of Journalism Studies, The University of Sheffield, Sheffield S1 4DT, United Kingdom. p.milin@sheffield.ac.uk
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Abstract

In our commentary on Branigan & Pickering (B&P), we start by arguing that the authors implicitly adopt several assumptions, the consequence of which is to make further claims necessary and/or sufficient. Crucially, the authors assume the existence of discrete units at various levels of linguistic granularity that then must be operated upon by combinatorial mechanisms and rules (i.e., decomposition/recomposition). They further argue that structural priming provides a powerful tool to study abstract, structural representations. We provide evidence that priming effects in production are characterized better as graded than as all-or-none and that priming need not arise from a mechanism that (re)activates a shared but abstract internal structure.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 40 , 2017 , e287
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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