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Syntactic/structural priming has been shown to take place during comprehension. However, early comprehension findings revealed discrepancies with those in production, such as little to no abstract priming, yet readily observable lexically-mediated priming. These observations spurred important questions about whether structural processing is more lexically dependent during comprehension, whether abstract priming occurs at all during comprehension, and whether the mechanisms of structural facilitation are shared across these two modalities. The past decade has fortunately yielded many influential structural priming studies in comprehension, including those that seek to bridge the gap between structural processing across production and comprehension. This review serves to summarize recent findings that provide compelling evidence that abstract structural priming and learning do take place in comprehension, and that these effects show parity with those found in production. Competing mechanistic explanations of structural priming are also reviewed and considered in light of findings in both modalities. Lastly, a summary is provided that outlines future lines of inquiry needed to establish a better understanding of structural representation, priming, and learning in comprehension, and more generally.

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While many recent studies focused on abstract syntactic priming effects have implicated an error-based learning mechanism, there is little consensus on the most likely mechanism underlying the lexical boost. The current study aimed at refining understanding of the mechanism that leads to this priming effect. In two eye-tracking during reading experiments, the nature of the lexical boost was investigated by comparing predictions from competing accounts in terms of decay and the requirement of structural overlap between primes and targets. Experiment 1 revealed facilitation of target structure processing for shorter relative to longer primes, when there were fewer intervening words between prime and target verbs. In Experiment 2, significant lexically boosted priming effects were observed, but only when the target structure also appeared in the prime, and not when the prime had a different structure but a high degree of lexical overlap with the target. Overall, these results are most consistent with a short-lived mechanistic account rather than an error-based learning account of the lexical boost. Furthermore, these results align with dual-mechanism accounts of syntactic priming whereby different mechanisms are claimed to produce abstract syntactic priming effects and the lexical boost.

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The nature of the facilitation occurring when sentences share a verb and syntactic structure (i.e., lexically-mediated syntactic priming) has not been adequately addressed in comprehension. In four eye-tracking experiments, we investigated the degree to which lexical, syntactic, thematic, and verb form repetition contribute to facilitated target sentence processing. Lexically-mediated syntactic priming was observed when primes and targets shared a verb and abstract syntactic structure, regardless of the ambiguity of the prime. In addition, repeated thematic role assignment resulted in syntactic priming (to a lesser degree), and verb form repetition facilitated lexical rather than structural processing. We conclude that priming in comprehension involves lexically associated abstract syntactic representations, and facilitation of verb and thematic role processes. The results also indicate that syntactic computation errors during prime processing are not necessary for lexically-mediated priming to occur during target processing. This result is inconsistent with an error-driven learning account of lexically-mediated syntactic priming effects.

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The aim of this study was to determine whether cumulative structural priming effects and trial-to-trial lexically-mediated priming effects are produced by the same mechanism in comprehension. Participants took part in a five-session eye tracking study where they read reduced-relative prime-target pairs with the same initial verb. Half of the verbs in these sentences were repeated across the five sessions and half were novel to each session. Total fixation times on the syntactically challenging parts of prime sentences decreased across sessions, suggesting participants implicitly learned the structure. Additional priming was also observed at the critical regions of the target sentences, and the magnitude of this effect did not change over the five sessions. These finding suggests long-lived adaptation to structure and short-lived lexically-mediated priming effects are caused by separate mechanisms in comprehension. A dual mechanism account of syntactic priming effects can best reconcile these results.

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Recent work in the literature on prosody presents a puzzle: Some aspects of prosody can be primed in production (e.g., speech rate), but others cannot (e.g., intonational phrase boundaries, or IPBs). In three experiments we aimed to replicate these effects and identify the source of this dissociation. In Experiment 1 we investigated how speaking rate and the presence of an intonational boundary in a prime sentence presented auditorily affect the production of these aspects of prosody in a target sentence presented visually. Analyses of the targets revealed that participants' speaking rates, but not their production of boundaries, were affected by the priming manipulation. Experiment 2 verified whether speakers are more sensitive to IPBs when the boundaries provide disambiguating information, and in this different context replicated Experiment 1 in showing no IPB priming. Experiment 3 tested whether speakers are sensitive to another aspect of prosody-pitch accenting-in a similar paradigm. Again, we found no evidence that this manipulation affected pitch accenting in target sentences. These findings are consistent with earlier research and suggest that aspects of prosody that are paralinguistic (like speaking rate) may be more amenable to priming than are linguistic aspects of prosody (such as phrase boundaries and pitch accenting).

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Structural priming creates structural persistence. That is, differences in experience with syntax can change subsequent language performance, and the changes can be observed in both language production and comprehension. However, the effects in comprehension and production appear to differ. In comprehension, persistence is typically found when the verbs are the same in primes and targets; in production, persistence occurs without verb overlap. The contrast suggests a theoretically important hypothesis: parsing in comprehension is lexically driven while formulation in production is structurally driven. A major weakness in this hypothesis about comprehension-production differences is that its empirical motivation rests on the outcomes of experiments in which the priming manipulations differ, the primed sentence structures differ, and the measures of priming differ. To sharpen the comparison, we examined structural persistence with and without verb overlap in both reading comprehension and spoken production, using the same prime presentation procedure, the same syntactic structures, the same sentences, and the same participants. These methods yielded abstract structural persistence in comprehension as well as production. A measure of the strength of persistence revealed significant effects of priming and verb overlap without significant comprehension-production differences. This argues for uniformity in the structural mechanisms of language processing.

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Syntactic priming occurs when structural information from one sentence influences processing of a subsequently encountered sentence (Bock, 1986; Ledoux et al., 2007). This article reports 2 eye-tracking experiments investigating the effects of a prime sentence on the processing of a target sentence that shared aspects of syntactic form. The experiments were designed to determine the degree to which lexical overlap between prime and target sentences produced larger effects, comparable to the widely observed "lexical boost" in production experiments (Pickering & Branigan, 1998; Pickering & Ferreira, 2008). The current experiments showed that priming effects during online comprehension were in fact larger when a verb was repeated across the prime and target sentences (see also Tooley et al., 2009). The finding of larger priming effects with lexical repetition supports accounts under which syntactic form representations are connected to individual lexical items (e.g., Tomasello, 2003; Vosse & Kempen, 2000, 2009).

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Three experiments investigated factors contributing to syntactic priming during on-line comprehension. In all of the experiments, a prime sentence containing a reduced relative clause was presented prior to a target sentence that contained the same structure. Previous studies have shown that people respond more quickly when a syntactically related prime sentence immediately precedes a target. In the current study, ERP and eyetracking measures were used to assess whether priming in sentence comprehension persists when one or more unrelated filler sentences appear between the prime and the target. In experiment 1, a reduced P600 was found to target sentences both when there were no intervening unrelated fillers, and when there was one unrelated filler between the prime and the target. Thus, processing the prime sentence facilitated processing of the syntactic form of the target sentence. Experiments 2 and 3, eye-tracking experiments, showed that target sentence processing was facilitated when three filler sentences intervened between the prime and the target. These experiments show that priming effects in comprehension can be observed when unrelated material appears after a prime sentence and before the target. We interpret the results with respect to residual activation and implicit learning accounts of priming.

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In 3 experiments, we investigated whether intonational phrase structure can be primed. In all experiments, participants listened to sentences in which the presence and location of intonational phrase boundaries were manipulated such that the recording included either no intonational phrase boundaries, a boundary in a structurally dispreferred location, a boundary in a preferred location, or boundaries in both locations. In Experiment 1, participants repeated the sentences to test whether they would reproduce the prosodic structure they had just heard. Experiments 2 and 3 used a prime-target paradigm to evaluate whether the intonational phrase structure heard in the prime sentence might influence that of a novel target sentence. Experiment 1 showed that participants did repeat back sentences that they had just heard with the original intonational phrase structure, yet Experiments 2 and 3 found that exposure to intonational phrase boundaries on prime trials did not influence how a novel target sentence was prosodically phrased. These results suggest that speakers may retain the intonational phrasing of a sentence, but this effect is not long-lived and does not generalize across unrelated sentences. Furthermore, these findings provide no evidence that intonational phrase structure is formulated during a planning stage that is separate from other sources of linguistic information.

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Theories of eye-movement control in reading should ultimately describe how differences in knowledge and cognitive abilities affect reading and comprehension. Current mathematical models of eye-movement control do not yet incorporate individual differences as a source of variation in reading, although developmental and group-difference effects have been studied. These models nonetheless provide an excellent foundation for describing and explaining how and why patterns of eye-movements differ across readers (e.g., Rayner, Chace, & Ashby, 2006). Our focus in this article is on two aspects of individual variation: global processing speed (e.g., Salthouse, 1996) and working-memory capacity (e.g., Just & Carpenter, 1992). Using Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) (Raudenbush & Bryk, 2001), we tested the extent to which overall reading speed and working-memory capacity moderate the degree to which syntactic and semantic information affect fixation times. Previous published data (Traxler et al., 2005) showed that working memory capacity and syntactic complexity interacted to determine fixation times in an eye-movement monitoring experiment. In a new set of models based on this same data set, we found that working-memory capacity interacted with sentence-characteristic variables only when processing speed was not included in the model. We interpret these findings with respect to current accounts of sentence processing and suggest how they might be incorporated into eye-movement control models.

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Event-related potentials and eye tracking were used to investigate the nature of priming effects in sentence comprehension. Participants read 2 sentences (a prime sentence and a target sentence), both of which had a difficult and ambiguous sentence structure. The prime and target sentences contained either the same verb or verbs that were very close in meaning. Priming effects were robust when the verb was repeated. In the event-related potential experiment, the amplitude of the P600 was reduced in target sentences that followed prime sentences with the same verb but not in prime sentences with a synonymous verb. In the eye-tracking experiment, total reading times on the disambiguating region were reduced when the targets followed prime sentences with the same verb but not when targets followed prime sentences with a synonymous verb. The fact that verb overlap greatly boosted priming effects in reduced relative sentences may indicate that verb argument structures play an important role in online parsing.

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Right hemisphere brain damage (RHD) rarely causes aphasias marked by clear and widespread failures of comprehension or extreme difficulty producing fluent speech. Nonetheless, subtle language comprehension deficits can occur following unilateral RHD. In this article, we review the empirical record on discourse function following right hemisphere damage, as well as relevant work on non-brain damaged individuals that focuses on right hemisphere function. The review is divided into four sections that focus on discourse processing, inferencing, humor, and non-literal language. While the exact role that the right hemisphere plays in language processing, and the exact way that the two cerebral hemispheres coordinate their linguistic processes are still open to debate, our review suggests that the right hemisphere plays a critical role in managing inferred or implied information by maintaining relevant information and/or suppressing irrelevant information. Deficits in one or both of these mechanisms may account for discourse deficits following RHD.

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Studies of syntactic ambiguity resolution have played a central role in resolving questions about when and how contextual information affects parsing processes. These investigations are often couched in terms of modularity versus interaction, with demonstrations of rapid contextual effects being taken as evidence that the mechanisms responsible for structuring sentences are permeable to referential or semantic context, and therefore non-modular. In this paper, we will propose that argument relations are constructed on the basis of lexically stored syntactic representations (as in MacDonald, M.C., Pearlmutter, N.J., and Seidenberg, M.S. (1994). Lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution. Psychological Review, 101, 676-703. Pickering, M.J., and Traxler, M.J. (2004). Grammatical repetition and garden path effects. Paper presented to the CUNY Sentence Processing Conference. College Park, MD., Pickering, M.J., and Traxler, M.J. (2006). Syntactic Priming in Comprehension. Manuscript in preparation. Traxler, M.J., and Pickering, M.J. (2005, March). Syntactic priming in comprehension. Paper presented to the CUNY Sentence Processing Conference. Tucson, AZ), but that other types of structural decisions are made on the basis of general processing principles. This formulation can be tested by looking at how the parser reacts to immediate intra- and inter-sentential factors (short-term context) and how it reacts to patterns of input over longer time scales (long-term context). We begin with a brief review of work on context effects in syntactic disambiguation, sketch our account of parsing, and then provide evidence from two eye-tracking experiments that illustrate some of the processing principles that govern parsing of argument relations.

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