ABSTRACT

Structural priming is a cognitive repetition phenomenon that refers to a speaker’s tendency to produce a sentence with a previously heard or produced syntactic structure rather than use an alternative structure that expresses similar message content (Bock, 1986; Ferreira & Bock, 2006). For example, if a speaker produces a prepositional dative (e.g., ‘I should show our vacation photos to your mother’), she will be more likely to produce another prepositional dative later on (e.g., ‘I sent all the postcards to my co-workers’), rather than a double-object dative (e.g., ‘I sent my co-workers all the postcards’), which is an example of within-speaker priming. Between-speaker priming also occurs, such as during conversation, when speakers use a structure that their interlocutor recently produced. Structural priming experiments typically present models of the alternating structures (e.g., primes) and elicit novel utterances through words, phrases, or incomplete sentences (e.g., prompts) that the participants use to generate new utterances. Structural priming is evidenced when a speaker, for example, produces more passives after passive primes than active primes, and produces more actives after active primes than passive primes.