Structural priming from complex sentences

Speakers tend to reuse recently encountered linguistic forms such as alternants of the dative alternation. This study explores whether speakers’ tendency to reuse forms of this alternation is affected by the syntactic context in which the form occurs. Speakers were exposed to forms of the alternation occurring in either matrix position of complex sentences or in an embedded position, i.e., a complement or relative clause. Experiment One found that speakers reused a given form regardless of where it originally occurred. Experiment Two found that the tendency to reuse recently encountered forms persists over long intervals and is independent of the syntactic context of the prime. These findings suggest that structural priming is not influenced by the syntactic complexity of the context of the prime.