Towards Human Cognition: Visual Context Guides Syntactic Priming in Fusion-Encoded Models

Abstract: We introduced PRISMATIC, the first multimodal structural priming dataset, and proposed a reference-free evaluation metric that assesses priming effects without predefined target sentences. Using this metric, we constructed and tested models with different multimodal encoding architectures (dual encoder and fusion encoder) to investigate their structural preservation capabilities. Our findings show that models with both encoding methods demonstrate comparable syntactic priming effects. However, only fusion-encoded models exhibit robust positive correlations between priming effects and visual similarity, suggesting a cognitive process more aligned with human psycholinguistic patterns. This work provides new insights into evaluating and understanding how syntactic information is processed in multimodal LLMs.