Corpus-based evidence against sequence priming

Syntactic priming refers to the fact that speakers are more likely to produce a target utterance with a given structure if they have previously produced (or comprehended) a prime with the same structure. In the experimental literature (e.g., Bock 1986), priming has only been studied in cases where there are two semantically equivalent structural alternatives (e.g., active and passive) in the prime and the target. Recent corpus-based work (Reitter et al. 2006) demonstrated that syntactic priming generalizes to the repetition of arbitrary syntactic rules in a corpus, rather than being limited to specific structural alternatives.