Syntactic Priming Effects in Comprehension: A Critical Review

Abstract Syntactic priming occurs when processing of a target sentence is facilitated following processing of a prime sentence that has the same syntactic structure (Bock, 1986 Cognitive Psychology , 18. 355–387). Syntactic priming has been widely investigated in production (Bock, 1986 Cognitive Psychology , 18. 355–387; Bock and Griffin, 2000 General. 129(2). 177–192; Cleland and Pickering, 2003. Journal of Memory and Language , 49. 214–230; Cleland and Pickering 2006. Journal of Memory and Language , 54. 185–198; Pickering and Branigan, 1998. Journal of Memory and Language , 39. 633–651; and others), but only relatively recently in comprehension (Arai et al. 2007. Cognitive Psychology , 54(3). 218–250; Ledoux et al., 2007. Psychological Science . 18(2). 135–143; and others). This article reviews the current literature on syntactic priming in comprehension and contrasts these findings to those in production. Critically, syntactic priming effects in comprehension are observed more often when prime and target sentences share a content word, whereas in production, these effects are often observed when there are no shared content words between the primes and targets. Possible explanations for the differing degrees of lexical dependency between syntactic priming effects in production and in comprehension are posed and include differences in task paradigms and stimuli, differences in time course and syntactic processing between the two modalities, and mechanistic differences. Implications from the reviewed literature are then considered in attempts at determining the most likely mechanistic explanation for syntactic priming effects in both comprehension and production. A residual activation account (Pickering and Branigan, 1998. Journal of Memory and Language , 39. 633–651), an implicit learning account (Bock and Griffin, 2000 General. 129(2). 177–192; Chang et al. 2006. Psychological Review , 113(2). 234–272), and a dual mechanism account (Tooley, 2009. Is Syntactic Priming in Sentence Comprehension Really Just Implicit Learning? Paper presented to the 22nd Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing , Davis, March 26–28) are outlined. The dual mechanism account may prove more consistent with a wider range of the reviewed research findings.