Structural priming persists for (at least) one month in young adults, but not in healthy older adults.

Abstract

Implicit learning theories suggest that we update syntactic knowledge based on prior experience (e.g., Chang et al., 2006). To determine the limits of the extent to which implicit learning can influence syntactic processing, we investigated whether structural priming effects persist up to 1 month postexposure, and whether they persist less long in healthy older (compared to younger) adults. We conducted a longitudinal experiment with three sessions: Session A, Session B (1 week after A), and Session C (4 weeks after B). For young adults, we found passive priming effects to persist and accumulate across sessions (1 week and 4 weeks). However, for older adults the effects persisted for 1 week but not 4. This suggests that for young adults, who unlike older adults experience no age-related decline in implicit memory, the limit to the duration of structural priming persistence is longer than 4 weeks. In a second longitudinal experiment with two sessions 1 week apart we found that priming in Session A affected syntactic processing in a different, independent task in Session B, both for young and older adults. Experiment 2 suggests that implicit persistence of the learned syntax is not limited to a specific context or task. Together, our findings give insight into how structural priming can contribute to language change throughout the life span, showing that implicit learning is a pervasive and robust mechanism that contributes to syntactic processing.

Priming of Possessive Constructions in German: A Matter of Preference Effects?

“…We found an effect that survived till a post-test that immediately followed the priming phase. Recent evidence suggests that structural priming may affect preferences over longer time intervals such as one week (Kaschak et al 2011), and that inverse preference effects persist even one month after the experimental manipulation (Heyselaar and Segaert 2022). Future research will show whether preference effects survive longer time periods without priming or whether they are dependent on conditions where they can continuously renew themselves.…”

“…Even though intervening trials with a structure different from the primes may reduce priming effects (Bock and Kroch 1989), structural priming has been shown to persist across trials (Bock and Griffin 2000), as well as from a priming phase to a response phase (Kaschak 2007). Effects of structural priming are attested a week (Kaschak et al 2011) or even a month after the experimental session (Heyselaar and Segaert 2022). By contrast, the lexical boost decays quickly and cannot be traced across trials (Hartsuiker et al 2008).…”

“…Are the units involved in preference and inverse preference effects identical or do they differ? Might differences in cumulative structural priming between younger and older speakers (Heyselaar and Segaert 2022) be accounted for by an input-based mechanism ceasing to interfere with the residual activation mechanism across the lifespan (cf. Chang et al 2006)?…”

Priming the Arabic dative: Evidence for syntactic abstractness and implicit learning

“…The infinitive form of verbs in Arabic is also the 3rd person, singular, masculine, past tense of the verb; thus, participants were required to mark the verb for gender whenever the subject was feminine. The position of the agent, them, and recipient was not counterbalanced in the pictures since DO priming studies do not control for this effect (e.g., Grüter et al, 2021;experiment 3 in Jaeger and Snider, 2013;Kaschak et al, 2014;Peter et al, 2015) while passive priming studies usually do (Messenger et al, 2012;Heyselaar and Segaert, 2022). As for audio stimuli, all prime sentences were voice-recorded by a professional female native Arabic speaker who was instructed to use MSA and to read the sentences as naturally as possible.…”

“…However, most of the established properties of syntactic priming are based on evidence from studies conducted on a small group of typologically similar languages such as Dutch (Bernolet and Hartsuiker, 2010;Segaert et al, 2013;Bernolet et al, 2014Bernolet et al, , 2016Zhang et al, 2020Zhang et al, , 2022Chen and Hartsuiker, 2021), German Pechmann, 2013, 2014;Köhne et al, 2014), as well as English (Savage et al, 2006;Bock et al, 2007;Santesteban et al, 2010;Kaschak et al, 2011a;Kidd, 2012;Rowland et al, 2012;Bunger et al, 2013;Jaeger and Snider, 2013;Tooley and Bock, 2014;Branigan and McLean, 2016;Branigan and Messenger, 2016;Hardy et al, 2017Hardy et al, , 2020Carminati et al, 2019;Litcofsky and van Hell, 2019;Bidgood et al, 2020;Chia et al, 2020;Messenger, 2021;Heyselaar and Segaert, 2022;van Gompel et al, 2022). Interestingly, sometimes findings differ even between closely related languages.…”