Structural priming is a widely used psycholinguistic paradigm to study human
sentence representations. In this work we propose a framework for using
empirical priming patterns to build a theory characterizing the structural
representations humans construct when processing sentences. This framework uses
a new cognitively motivated parser, SPAWN, to generate quantitative priming
predictions from theoretical syntax and evaluate these predictions with
empirical human behavior. As a case study, we apply this framework to study
reduced relative clause representations in English. We use SPAWN to generate
priming predictions from two theoretical accounts which make different
assumptions about the structure of relative clauses. We find that the
predictions from only one of these theories (Participial-Phase) align with
empirical priming patterns, thus highlighting which assumptions about relative
clause better capture human sentence representations.

使用一种新的认知动机解析器，基于实证启动模式的理论可以生成关于结构表示形式的定量预测，并通过实证的人类行为评估这些预测。本研究以简化的限定性从句表示作为案例研究应用该框架，并发现只有理论之一（分词 - 阶段论）的预测与实证启动模式相一致，从而突显了关于限定性从句更好地捕捉人类句子表示形式的假设。