Persistent structural priming from language comprehension to language production q , qq

To examine the relationship between syntactic processes in language comprehension and language production, we compared structural persistence from sentence primes that speakers heard to persistence from primes that speakers produced. [Bock, J. K., & Griffin, Z. M. (2000). The persistence of structural priming: transient activation or implicit learning? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 129, 177–192.] showed that the production of target priming structures increased the probability of spontaneously using the same structures to describe events in subsequent pictures that were semantically unrelated to the primes. These priming effects persisted across as many as ten intervening filler trials. The present studies replicated these results using auditorily presented primes to which participants only listened. The results indicated persistence of priming across all lags, with relative magnitudes of priming as large as 0010-0277/$ see front matter 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2006.07.003 q This manuscript was accepted under the editorship of Jacques Mehler. qq The research and the preparation of the manuscript were supported in part by grants from the National Science Foundation (SBR 94-11627; SBR 98-73450; BCS-0214270) and by research and training grants from the National Institutes of Health (R01 HD21011; R01 MH66089; T32 MH1819990). Some of the findings were first reported at the 2001 CUNY Sentence Processing Conference. We thank Agnieszka Konopka, Elizabeth Octigan, and Matthew Rambert for their assistance. * Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 217 244 1121. E-mail address: [email protected] (K. Bock). 438 K. Bock et al. / Cognition 104 (2007) 437–458 those observed by Bock and Griffin. The implication is that structural priming is persistent regardless of the modality in which language structures are experienced, underscoring the power of priming as an implicit learning mechanism. 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.