Priming of Syntactic Rules in Task-Oriented Dialogue and Spontaneous Conversation

Abstract

Previous work provided corpus evidence for structural priming forspecific syntactic constructions. The present paper extends theseresults by investigating priming effects involving arbitrarysyntactic rules in spoken dialogue corpora. We demonstrate theexistence of within- and between-speaker priming in both spontaneousconversation (the Switchboard corpus) and task-oriented dialogue(the Map Task corpus). We also find that between-speaker priming isstronger in the Map Task corpus. This supports the hypothesis thatin task-oriented dialog, low-level priming is linked to higher-levelalignment of situation models.