Abstract. This research examines the influence of prosodic shape, token frequency, and recency on comparative form preferences in English. To examine this, participants completed an unprimed and a primed forced-choice acceptabilityjudgment task. While the unprimed study's results show that comparative form selection is largely influenced by an adjective's prosodic shape and token frequency, the primed study shows that recency also plays a role in comparative form selection. More specifically, when primed with a synthetic comparative, participants were less likely to choose the comparative form that the adjective typically occurs in. These results are paralleled by the reaction time results, suggesting that recency of a synthetic comparative may cause either a facilitatory or inhibitory effect when selecting a comparative form.Keywords. comparatives; prosodic shape; frequency; recency; priming 1. Introduction. In English, there are two comparative forms for adjectives: the synthetic comparative, formed with -er (e.g., easier, smarter), and the analytic comparative, formed with more (e.g., more famous, more clever). For many adjectives, English speakers prefer one form over the other. For example, easier is typically preferred over more easy, and more famous is typically preferred over famouser. These preferred comparative forms occur more frequently than the less preferred forms: In the Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies 2008-), easier occurs over 30,000 times, while more easy occurs fewer than 100 times; and more famous occurs over 500 times, while famouser occurs only 3 times. Importantly, however, both forms occur. In this paper, I investigate what causes English speakers to select either the synthetic or the analytic comparative form, specifically examining the role of prosodic shape, token frequency, and most importantly, recency-the recent occurrence of a form in the discourse.It is well known that an adjective's prosodic shape influences comparative form selection