When people speak, they have to choose a syntactic structure for their utterances. Research shows that this choice is not made independently for each utterance, and that it is influenced by properties of recent utterances (Bock, 1986). But the learning mechanisms responsible for this influence, and its duration are not completely clear. Pickering and Branigan (1998) suggest that structural repe...

This study explores the grammatical representations employed by preschoolers during online sentence processing. Tomasello and colleagues have argued that young children, unlike adults, are limited to structural representations organized around individual lexical items (Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4 (2000) 156). Evidence for broader syntactic representations in adults comes from, among other th...

We argue that task requirements can be the determinant in generating different results in studies on visual object recognition. We investigated priming for novel visual objects in three implicit memory tasks. A study-test design was employed in which participants first viewed line drawings of unfamiliar objects and later made different decisions about structural aspects of the objects. Priming ...

This study examines structural priming in an on-line reading task that compares reading performance by first and second language readers of English. Robust effects for priming were evident for the second, but not first, language readers, suggesting that priming may occur where there are insufficient sentence traces in memory to support sentence interpretation. The empirical results are simulate...

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 co...

Abstract We investigated L1 and L2 frequency effects in the sharing of syntax across languages (reflected cross-linguistic structural priming) using an artificial language (AL) paradigm. Ninety-six Dutch speakers learned AL with either a prepositional-object (PO) dative bias (PO datives appeared three times as often double-object [DO] datives) or DO (DOs POs). Priming was assessed from to (a st...

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 pr...

Scheepers et al. [Scheepers, C., Sturt, P., Martin, C. J., Myachykov, A., Teevan, K., & Viskupova, I. (2011). Structural priming across cognitive domains: From simple arithmetic to relative clause attachment. Psychological Science, 22, 1319-1326. doi:10.1177/0956797611416997] showed that the structure of a correctly solved mathematical equation affects how people subsequently complete sentences...

Structural priming is a powerful method to inform linguistic theories. We argue that this method extends nicely beyond syntax to theories of meaning. Priming, however, should still be seen as only one of the tools available for linguistic data collection. Specifically, because priming can occur at different, potentially conflicting levels, it cannot detect every aspect of linguistic representat...

The status of perceptual priming and word-completion priming in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) was examined. Experiment 1 established the reliability of the perceptual priming measure in normal subjects. In Experiment 2, AD patients showed a normal magnitude of perceptual priming. In Experiment 3, a single group of AD patients showed a normal magnitude of perceptual priming and impaired...