Syntactic Entrainment: The Repetition of Syntactic Structures in Event Descriptions.

Syntactic structures can convey certain (subtle) emergent properties of events. For example, the double-object dative ("the doctor is giving a patient pills") can convey the successful transfer of possession, whereas its syntactic alternative, the prepositional dative ("the doctor is giving pills to a patient"), conveys just a transfer to a location. Four experiments explore how syntactic structures may become associated with particular semantic content - such as these emergent properties of events.

Aligning sentence structures in dialogue: evidence from aphasia.

Syntactic alignment in dialogue is pervasive and enduring in unimpaired speakers, facilitating language processing and learning. Recent work suggests that syntactic alignment extends to the level of event-semantic properties (). Two experiments examined whether syntactic entrainment can ameliorate impaired message-structure mapping in persons with aphasia (PWA).