The “sense boost” to dative priming: Evidence for sense-specific verb-structure links

• Many dative verbs can be seen to have different senses (concrete vs. abstract).
• We investigated whether these verbs have sense-specific lemma representations.
• Syntactic priming for datives was boosted by verb sense repetition.
• Without sense repetition, verb form repetition still caused enhanced priming.
• Datives with abstract and concrete themes caused equivalent priming.

Many dative verbs can be seen to have different senses – e.g. give’s prototypical ‘transfer of possession’ sense in togive someone a hat vs. its more abstract ‘cause an effect’ sense in togive someone a heart attack – and it could be the case that these different senses correspond to separate lexical representations, with their own links to syntactic information in memory. This study used syntactic priming to investigate this issue. Experiment 1 showed a “sense boost” to dative priming: Stronger priming was observed when the dative verbs in prime and target sentences were used in the same sense than when they were used in different senses. Experiment 2 showed that, in the absence of sense repetition, form overlap between the head verbs of prime and target sentences still caused a boost to dative priming. Finally, Experiment 3 confirmed that the sense boost observed in Experiment 1 was not caused by a general difference in priming strength between dative prime sentences with literal ‘transfer’ vs. more abstract or figurative meanings: When the target pictures depicted the target verbs’ abstract senses, prime sentences with abstract meanings caused stronger priming than prime sentences describing a concrete transfer. These results suggest that the various senses of dative verbs have separate representations that are linked to the syntactic constructions they can be used in.