Long-term structural priming affects subsequent patterns of language production

Abstract

This article reports three experiments exploring how experience producing particular syntactic constructions affects the rates at which those constructions will be produced in the future. In the first part of each experiment, the participants' experience at producing the double object (DO) and prepositional object (PO) constructions was manipulated so that they produced a certain proportion of DO and PO constructions. Subsequent to the establishment of these biases, the participants were given the opportunity to produce either DO or PO constructions. The main findings show that (1) patterns of experience with the DO and PO constructions affected the base rates of production for the DO and PO constructions, but not the strength of structural priming observed between particular prime sentences and particular target sentences, and (2) patterns of experience with the DO and PO constructions affected the production of subsequent sentences even across changes in the nature of the language production task. The theoretical implications of these results are discussed.