Chapter 5 What Lurks Beneath : Syntactic Priming During Language Comprehension in Preschoolers ( and Adults )

syntactic priming for the kinds of sentences that we intended to explore (post-verbal ambiguities in argument structure). Two of the studies that found robust priming effects (Luka & Barsalou, 2005; Noppeney & Price, 2004) used structures which were not semantically equivalent (e.g., relative clause attachment ambiguities), leaving open the possibility that the priming effects were semantic rather than syntactic. In addition, these studies used measures with a coarse temporal grain, creating uncertainty about whether the effects are due to initial structural analysis or later reanalysis. Two recent eye-tracking studies have searched for evidence of priming during online comprehension. Scheepers & Crocker (2004) studied the processing of German transitive sentences with case-marking. They found that the online interpretation of ambiguously marked preverbal arguments was influenced by prior unambiguously marked prime sentences. In contrast, using the English dative alternation, Arai, Van Gompel and Scheepers (2007) looked for priming of the interpretation of post-verbal arguments. They found priming when prime and target sentences contained the same verb, but not when they contained different verbs (see also Branigan, Pickering & McLean, 2005). Thus, while there is robust evidence for verb-specific priming during comprehension the scope and status of abstract priming is uncertain. Our first experiment revisited the role of abstract structural