Thematic emphasis in language production

In three experiments, we investigate whether speakers tend to perseverate in the assignment of emphasis to concepts with particular thematic roles across utterances. Participants matched prime sentences involving clefts (e.g., Het is de cowboy die hij slaat, “It is the cowboy that he is hitting”) to pictures and then described unrelated transitive events. Participants were more likely to produce a passive after a cleft that emphasised the patient than after a cleft that emphasised the agent. Because prime and target sentences are syntactically unrelated, our study demonstrated nonsyntactic structural priming. We propose that speakers use such priming to facilitate the construction of coherent discourse.