Structural priming reflects a tendency to generalize recently spoken or heard syntactic structures to different utterances. We propose that it is a form of implicit learning. To explore this hypothesis, we developed and tested a connectionist model of language production that incorporated mechanisms previously used to simulate implicit learning. In the model, the mechanism that learned to produ...

The implications of priming experiments for a structural theory of the mental lexicon depend critically on the development of an adequate theory of the mechanics of priming. Masked priming techniques may simplify this task, since consciously perceived relationships play no role in masked priming. The implications of adopting an activation-based approach to morphological priming is discussed, an...

Structural priming, the tendency to repeat previously uttered syntactic structures, can give insight into human language processing and acquisition. We report two corpus-based studies of children’s structural priming that test the following claim of the item-based account of language acquisition: as older children generalize over structures, priming increases with age. A hypothesis derived from...

Previous research in several European languages has shown that the language processing system is sensitive to both structural frequency and structural priming effects. However, it is currently not clear whether these two types of effects interact during online sentence comprehension, especially for languages that do not have morphological markings. To explore this issue, the present study inves...

Structural priming reveals a new horizon in the research of bilingual syntactic representations. It facilitates the interpretation of bilingual syntactic transfer and syntactic misuse. So structural priming in L2 (second language) is practically meaningful for L2 teaching and learning. This paper attempts to review the within-language and between-language priming, as well as interaction studies...

Recently there has been a surge of interest in using structural priming to examine sentence production. We present an analogical model of sentence production that exhibits structural priming effects. It uses analogical generalization to acquire abstract language patterns from experience. To construct utterances, it uses analogical retrieval to find semantically similar utterances and generaliza...

Structural priming paradigms have been influential in shaping theories of adult sentence processing and theories of syntactic development. However, until recently there have been few attempts to provide an integrated account that explains both adult and developmental data. The aim of the present paper was to begin the process of integration by taking a developmental approach to structural primi...

Four structural priming experiments investigated the lexical boost effect in priming. In two experiments, we tested whether repeating subject prepositional object or double ditransitive structures boosted other manipulated repetition of verb. Repetition noun affected priming, but only when prime remained visible while participants produced target sentence. contrast, verb regardless could see an...

A substantial body of empirical work suggests people have a reliable tendency to match, amongst other things, their conversational partner’s body movements, speech style, and patterns of language use (Giles, Coupland and Coupland, 1991). Recently, a more specific ‘structural priming’ version of this claim has gained prominence (e.g. Pickering and Ferreira, 2008). Structural priming occurs when ...