Lexicalized theories of syntax often assume that verb-structure regularities are mediated by lemmas, which abstract over variation in verb tense and aspect. German syntax seems to challenge this assumption, because verb position depends on tense and aspect. To examine how German speakers link these elements, a structural priming study was performed which varied syntactic structure, verb positio...

Structural priming, i.e., the tendency to repeat linguistic material, can be explained by two alternative representational assumptions: either as the repetition of hierarchical representations generated by syntactic rules, or as the repetition of lexical sequences. We present two studies that test these explanations by investigating priming effects in a dialogue corpus. We compare syntactic con...

syntactic priming for the kinds of sentences that we intended to explore (post-verbal ambiguities in argument structure). Two of the studies that found robust priming effects (Luka & Barsalou, 2005; Noppeney & Price, 2004) used structures which were not semantically equivalent (e.g., relative clause attachment ambiguities), leaving open the possibility that the priming effects were semantic rat...

Previous work provided corpus evidence for structural priming for specific syntactic constructions. The present paper extends these results by investigating priming effects involving arbitrary syntactic rules in spoken dialogue corpora. We demonstrate the existence of withinand between-speaker priming in both spontaneous conversation (the Switchboard corpus) and task-oriented dialogue (the Map ...

The structure of previous sentences influences both production and comprehension of subsequent sentences, although there is less support for the latter. This effect, called structural priming, supposedly results from the repetition of syntactic structure, while evidence for the influence of thematic roles is controversial. We suggest that structural priming is achieved by automatic analogical m...

Within the cognitive sciences, most researchers assume that it is the job of linguists to investigate how language is represented, and that they do so largely by building theories based on explicit judgments about patterns of acceptability - whereas it is the task of psychologists to determine how language is processed, and that in doing so, they do not typically question the linguists' represe...

Structural priming in language production is a tendency to re-create 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) lon...

This paper investigates whether structural priming is sensitive to the phrasal vs. clausal nature of the constructions it tests. To that end, we examine NPs that receive a question-like interpretation when embedded under certain predicates. These NPs study that establishes co-occurrence patterns of the target embedding predicates. We t Both written sentence completion tasks demonstrate structur...

Research in analogical transfer suggests a simple type of transfer that occurs due to the activation of key relational concepts. Analysis on mental structured representations indicates that this transfer may act differently depending upon structural and perceptual features of the priming task. Two hundred eight participants were assigned to three experimental groups where they received a struct...