The Nature of Syntactic Priming – Relevance and Interplay of Semantic and Syntactic Information

It is an ongoing matter of debate, what the nature of syntactic priming effects, and hence, the nature of grammatical information in language processing is. Two specific issues are the focus of the current examination: firstly, the possible relevance of semantic information, and secondly, the role of different stages in grammatical encoding (as proposed by Levelt, 1989). The results of two German picture-description experiments indicate that semantic information plays a weak role in syntactic priming and that, within the double object construction, the two possible word orders (NP1(dative)-NP2(accusative) and NP2(accusative)-NP1(dative) can be primed but do not prime each other. This can be interpreted as the lack of a priming effect on a functional or hierarchy-only level in grammatical encoding. In addition, the nature of word order priming is further investigated.