Abstract
Repetition, as a common phenomenon of behavior, has been made extensive use of to illustrate mental representations. In the world of language, such repetition can be massively observed as well, which is called structural priming, people’s preference to reuse or better process the present structure due to its syntactic similarity to the previously processed or produced structures. Research around structural priming has been explosively conducted in within-language and cross-language contexts since Bock firstly introduced structural priming into language field in 1986. Research on structural priming centralizes on the underlying driven mechanisms of structural priming and its occurrence and function in language production and comprehension. As researchers investigate structural priming deeper, it is necessary to assess the current status of the research on structural priming and make directions for future research. This review is to offer an overview of the recent research on structural priming and recommendations for future investigations. For deeper and more thorough investigation of structural priming, the author points out that researchers can dive into investigations of structural priming in different range of subject, especially in second language learners and probe into social influencing factors of the occurrence and magnitude of structural priming in a more natural experimental paradigm.
Highlights
In the last couple of decades, researchers have revealed a new form of repetition in language world which is called structural priming
If it had been the semantic overlap that facilitates the comprehension process of target sentences, the priming effect would have been triggered by the synonym carrying the same semantic meaning, which showed that structural priming is syntactic priming instead of semantic priming
Construction Grammar [17], language is learned through constructions, a form and meaning paring, which means change of form leads to change of meaning, so there must be a difference between DO and PO construction to some degree, it is a constructional priming that make structural priming possible
Summary
In the last couple of decades, researchers have revealed a new form of repetition in language world which is called structural priming. The participant and the confederate depict a serial of pictures to each other in turn and pick the pictures according to the description This task is under condition that the confederate describes pictures with the verbs or structures written behind each picture, while the other participant create his or her descriptions freely and is unaware of the difference [6]. With these techniques, structural priming has been pervasively examined in language comprehension and production, offering convincing evidences to the existence of structural priming in language use. In what follows, the author presents a critical review of experimental research on the structural priming and tries to offer some future directions
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