It is often observed that people tend to match each others body movements, speech style, and patterns of language use during conversation (Giles Coupland and Coupland, 1991). Recently, it has been proposed that ‘structural priming’ should be added to this list (Pickering and Ferreira, 2008). Structural priming occurs when processing of a linguistic structure is facilitated by prior exposure to ...

Structural priming in language production is a tendency to recreate a recently uttered syntactic structure in different words. This tendency can be seen independent of specific lexical items, thematic roles, or word sequences. Two alternative proposals about the mechanism behind structural priming include (a) short-term activation from a memory representation of a priming structure and (b) long...

A critical flaw in Branigan & Pickering's (B&P's) advocacy of structural priming is the absence of a theory of priming. This undermines their claims about the value of priming as a methodology. In contrast, acceptability judgments enable clearer inferences about structure. It is important to engage thoroughly with the logic behind different structural diagnostics.

The increasing evidence that language processing is sensitive to lexical and structural co-occurrences at different levels of granularity and abstraction (Jurafsky, Bell, Gregory, & Raymond, 2001; Bybee, 2006) has led to the hypothesis that lexical and structural processing may be unified (MacDonald, Pearlmutter, & Seidenberg, 1994; Jurafsky, 1996). This paper examines the specific hypothesis t...

In structural priming, the structure of one sentence is echoed in the structure of a second sentence that may be otherwise unrelated to the first. It can occur without the intention to create syntactic parallelism and without specific pragmatic, thematic, and lexical support across utterances. To explore whether it can also occur without specific language support, when the source of priming is ...

What mechanisms underlie children's language production? Structural priming--the repetition of sentence structure across utterances--is an important measure of the developing production system. We propose its mechanism in children is the same as may underlie analogical reasoning: structure-mapping. Under this view, structural priming is the result of making an analogy between utterances, such t...

This paper presents a corpus-based account of structural priming in human sentence processing, focusing on the role that syntactic representations play in such an account. We estimate the strength of structural priming effects from a corpus of spontaneous spoken dialogue, annotated syntactically with Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) derivations. This methodology allows us to test a range of...