Long-term cumulative structural priming persists for (at least) one week

Abstract

We present an experiment that explores the degree to which cumulative structural priming effects of the sort reported in Kaschak (Memory and Cognition 35:925-937, 2007) persist over the course of a week. In the first session of the experiment, participants completed written sentence stems that were designed to bias them toward producing the double object (Meghan gave Michael a toy) or prepositional object (Meghan gave a toy to Michael) construction. Participants returned for a second session of the experiment a week later. We observed that the biases established in the first phase of the experiment affected performance in the second phase. That is, the cumulative priming effect persisted for a week. The implications of this result for theories of language production are discussed.Keywords Language production . Structural priming . Syntax . Implicit learning . Linguistic adaptation Structural priming refers to the tendency for language users to repeat syntactic structures across utterances (Bock, 1986). To illustrate using a particularly well-studied example, individuals who have recently heard or produced a double object construction (Meghan gave Michael a hug; DO) are more likely to subsequently produce another DO construction (The teacher sent the students a message) than to produce a prepositional object construction (The teacher sent a message to the students; PO). Structural priming is an extremely robust phenomenon. It has been observed in

Thirty years of structural priming: An introduction to the special issue

“…Bock and Griffin (2000) found priming undiminished after 10 sentences, and others have discovered that the influence of multiple primes accumulates and that such cumulative effects can last at least a week (Kaschak et al, 2011). The current papers replicate long-lag priming when prime and target are lexically unrelated and demonstrate that priming effects accumulate (e.g.…”

Individual Differences in Statistical Learning: Conceptual and Measurement Issues

“…This facilitation suggests that SL results in long-lasting representations, which is a necessary feature of any mechanism proposed to play a major role in language acquisition. To our knowledge, this represents one of the first demonstrations that learning in a putatively linguistic SL segmentation task is preserved over lengthy intervals (see [49,50] for demonstrations with visual SL segmentation over a shorter delay; [42], for a demonstration of long-lasting learning in an auditory task with non-verbal stimuli; and [59,60], for linguistic adaptations persisting for a week). Although this discovery is not surprising, the fact that it was only observed when multiple measures are taken in aggregate highlights the usefulness of using multiple convergent measures of SL.…”

Speech Accommodation Without Priming: The Case of Pitch

“…Support for the persistence of syntactic priming comes from observations of syntactic alignment effects after delays ranging from 15 minutes up to 7 days after the initial priming manipulation (Kaschak, Kutta, & Schatschneider, 2011;Kaschak, Kutta, & Coyle, 2014). Priming also persists across changes in location or experimental context (Kutta & Kaschak, 2012).…”