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Using a syntactic priming task, we investigated the time course of syntactic encoding in Chinese sentence production and compared encoding patterns between younger and older adults. Participants alternately read sentence descriptions and overtly described pictures, while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. We manipulated the abstract prime structure (active or passive) as well as the lexical overlap of the prime and the target (verb overlap or no overlap). The syntactic choice results replicated classical abstract priming and lexical boost effects in both younger and older adults. However, when production latency was taken into account, the speed benefit from syntactic repetition differed between the two age groups. Meanwhile, preferred priming facilitated production in both age groups, whereas nonpreferred priming inhibited production in the older group. For electroencephalography, an earlier effect of syntactic repetition and a later effect of lexical overlap showed a two-stage pattern of syntactic encoding. Older adults also showed a more delayed and interactive encoding pattern than younger adults, indicating a greater reliance on lexical information. These results are illustrative of the two-stage competition and residual activation models.

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How speakers sequence words and phrases remains a central question in cognitive psychology. Here we focused on understanding the representations and processes that underlie structural priming, the speaker's tendency to repeat sentence structures encountered earlier. Verb repetition from the prime to the target led to a stronger tendency to produce locative variants of the spray-load alternation following locative primes (e.g., load the boxes into the van) than following with primes (e.g., load the van with the boxes). These structural variants had the same constituent structure, ruling out abstract syntactic structure as the source of the verb boost effect. Furthermore, using cleft constructions (e.g., What the assistant loaded into the lift was the equipment), we found that the thematic role order (thematic role-position mappings) of the prime can persist separately from its argument structure (thematic role-syntactic function mappings). Moreover, both priming effects were enhanced by verb repetition and interacted with each other when the construction of the prime was also repeated in the target. These findings are incompatible with the traditional staged model of grammatical encoding, which postulates the independence of abstract syntax from thematic role information. We propose the interactive structure-building account, according to which speakers build a sentence structure by choosing a thematic role order and argument structure interactively based on their prior co-occurrence together with other structurally relevant information such as verbs and constructions.

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The current research investigated structural priming in Tagalog, a symmetrical voice language containing rich verbal morphology that results in changes in mapping between syntactic positions and thematic roles. This grammatically rare feature, which results in multiple transitive structures that are balanced in terms of the grammatical status of their arguments, provides the opportunity to test whether word order priming is sensitive to the voice morphology of the verb. In three sentence priming experiments (Ns = 64), we manipulated whether the target-verb prompt carried the same voice as the verb in the prime sentence. In all experiments, priming occurred only when the prime and target had the same voice morphology. Additionally, we found that the strength of word order priming depends on voice: stronger priming effects were found for the voice morpheme associated with a more flexible word order. The findings are consistent with learning-based accounts where language-specific representations for syntax emerge across developmental time. We discuss the implications of these results in the context of Tagalog's grammar. The results reveal the value of crosslinguistic data for theory-testing, and the value of structural priming in determining the representational nature of linguistic structure.

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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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Many previous studies have shown that syntactic priming is stronger when the verb is repeated between the prime and target sentences. This phenomenon is known as the lexical boost and has been interpreted as evidence for a direct association between individual verbs and structural information. However, in previous experiments, we found no lexical boost with the monotransitive structure and argued that this structure is not associated with individual lexical items. The results of these experiments instead suggested that monotransitive structure information is represented at the category-general level. The current study examined whether this finding generalises to verbs that can take either a monotransitive structure or a ditransitive structure. Our results demonstrated a lexical boost with double object ditransitive primes but not with monotransitive primes. This suggests that the monotransitive structure is indeed represented at the category-general level across different classes of verbs, whereas other structures are represented at the lexically specific level.

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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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Speakers sometimes encounter utterances that have anomalous linguistic features. Are such features registered during comprehension and transferred to speakers' production systems? In two experiments, we explored these questions. In a syntactic-priming paradigm, speakers heard prime sentences with novel or intransitive verbs as part of prepositional-dative or double-object structures (e.g., The chef munded the cup to the burglar or The doctor existed the pirate the balloon). Speakers then described target pictures eliciting the same structures, using the same or different novel or intransitive verbs. Speakers overall described targets with the same structures as the primes (abstract syntactic priming), but more so when the primes and targets had the same novel or intransitive verbs (a lexical boost), an effect that was only observed when the novel words served as the verbs in both the prime and target sentences. Such a lexical boost could only manifest if speakers formed associations between the verbs and structures in the primes during comprehension, and if these associations were then transferred to their production systems. We thus showed that anomalous utterance features are not ignored but persist (at least) in speakers' immediately subsequent production.

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Two self-paced reading experiments investigated priming in sentences containing "early" vs. "late closure" ambiguities. Early closure sentences impose relatively large processing costs at the point of syntactic disambiguation (Frazier & Rayner, 1982). The current study investigated a possible way to reduce processing costs. Target sentences were temporarily ambiguous and were disambiguated towards either the preferred "late" closure analysis or the dispreferred "early" closure analysis. Each target sentence was preceded by a prime that was either structurally identical or that required a different syntactic analysis. In Experiment 1, all of the prime sentences shared the same critical verb as the target (Arai et al., 2007; Carminati et al., 2008; Tooley et al., 2009, in press; Traxler et al., in press; Weber & Indefrey, 2009). In Experiment 2, verb repetition was eliminated by reorganizing the stimuli from Experiment 1. In Experiment 1, processing of the disambiguating verb was facilitated when an "early" closure target sentence followed an "early" closure prime. In Experiment 2, there were no significant priming effects, although an overall difference in processing time favored "late closure" targets. Combined analyses verified that the pattern of results in Experiment 1 differed significantly from Experiment 2. These experiments provide the first indication that "early" closure analyses can be primed and that such priming is more robust when a critical verb appears in both the prime and the target sentence. The results add to the body of data indicating a "lexical boost" for syntactic priming effects during comprehension. They have implications for theories of syntactic representation and processing (e.g., Boland & Blodgett, 2006; Vosse & Kempen, 2009; Sag et al., 2003).