The persistence of structural priming: Transient activation or implicit learning?

Abstract

Structural priming in language production is a tendency to recreate 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) longer term adaptation within the cognitive mechanisms for creating sentences, as a form of procedural learning. Two experiments evaluated these hypotheses, focusing on the persistence of structural priming. Both experiments yielded priming that endured beyond adjacent sentences, persisting over 2 intervening sentences in Experiment 1 and over 10 in Experiment 2. Although memory may have short-term consequences for some components of this kind of priming, the persisting effects are more compatible with a learning account than a transient memory account.

The return of the repressed: Abandoned parses facilitate syntactic reanalysis☆

“…It is the presence of a garden path effect on the disambiguating region of the critical sentences in both experiments that establishes this point. More generally, both the present study and the related studies discussed above may be seen as confirming the well-established point from the literature on structural priming in language production (e.g., Bock, 1986;Bock & Griffin, 2000;Branigan, Pickering, & Cleland, 2000) that language users retain abstract syntactic structures in a robust form of memory representation, even on the basis of brief exposure.…”

Is long-term structural priming affected by patterns of experience with individual verbs?☆

“…Previous research has demonstrated that the modality of sentence production has an effect on the patterns of structural priming that are observed. For example, experiments using spoken language production have demonstrated long-lasting structural priming between prime and target sentences (e.g., priming persists even when up to 10 filler sentences intervene between the prime and target; Bock & Griffin, 2000), but experiments using written language production have not (e.g., priming from a prime to a target is disrupted when even one filler intervenes between the sentences; Branigan, Pickering, & Cleland, 1999). Given such modality-based differences in structural priming, it should not be taken for granted that the effects reported here would be unchanged by switching the task to spoken language production.…”

“…Chang et al (2006) reconcile this difference between short-term and long-term priming by proposing the contribution of two kinds of mechanisms to structural priming. The basic structural priming effect (both short-and longterm priming effects) is produced by implicit learning within the language production system (Bock & Griffin, 2000;Chang et al, 2006). The basic priming effect may be augmented by explicit memory for the immediately preceding prime sentence, where the presence of shared lexical items between the prime and target sentence facilitates explicit retrieval of the prime sentence.…”

“…Beyond providing a tool through which to measure syntactic development, the mechanisms that give rise to structural priming may also be responsible for driving syntactic development itself (for a discussion of this point, see Bock & Griffin, 2000, among others). Similarly, Kaschak (2006;Kaschak & Glenberg, 2004) has argued that structural priming may underlie adults' ability to adapt to a new construction in their native language, suggesting that the mechanisms that produce structural priming may function to promote learning and adaptation in the language processing system throughout the lifespan (cf., Bock & Griffin, 2000). …”

“…As one particularly well-studied example of this phenomenon, language producers who have recently produced (or comprehended) a double object construction ("Meghan gave her mom a kiss") are more likely to produce another double object construction to describe a transfer event ("Mike sent his boss a postcard") than to produce a prepositional object construction to describe the same event ("Mike sent a postcard to his boss"; see Bock, 1986;Bock & Griffin, 2000;Pickering & Branigan, 1998). Structural priming has been observed with a range of syntactic constructions (e.g., Corley & Scheepers, 2002;Griffin & Weinstein-Tull, 2003;Hartsuiker & Kolk, 1998;Hartsuiker & Westenberg, 2000), and has been observed both in lab tasks (e.g., Bock, 1986;Pickering & Branigan, 1998) and in samples of naturally occurring speech (e.g., Gries, 2005;Weiner & Labov, 1983).…”