Implicit Learning and Syntactic Persistence: Surprisal and Cumulativity

Speakers often repeat syntactic structures that have recently been used by them or their interlocutors. Such syntactic persistence has variously been attributed to social causes (mimicking to be well-liked), to an effort to reduce processing costs, or as a side effect of either transient activation of previously processed structure or implicit learning. We present new evidence from syntactic persistence in conversational speech consistent with the view that syntactic persistence is an epiphenomenon. We propose that syntactic persistence is linked to the updating and maintenance of probabilistic syntactic knowledge. We find that syntactic persistence is SURPRISAL-SENSITIVE and CUMULATIVE: Syntactic persistence is stronger the less probable the prime and it is sufficiently long-lived to be cumulative.