Examination of the Mechanisms Driving Long-Range Prime-to-Target Structural Priming

Bock and Griffin (2000) presented two experiments demonstrating that structural priming (i.e., increased likelihood of producing a given syntactic form if you have just produced that form in another utterance) can be long-lasting. In their experiments, participants alternated between reading sentences aloud (where they read prime sentences aloud) and describing pictures (where the target pictures gave participants the opportunity to produce the same syntactic structure as was used for the prime sentence). The likelihood of describing the target picture with the same structure as the prime sentence was shown to be equally strong when the prime and target were presented in immediate succession (Lag 0) and when they were separated by up to 10 intervening filler sentences (Lag 10). This result has been taken as evidence for the claim that structural priming is the result of implicit learning within the language production system. The current project is aimed at taking a closer look at the factors that affect the persistence of structural priming across numerous filler items. Overall, our data provided mixed support for Bock and Griffin's (2000) claims. Although we found a robust priming effect at adjacent prime-target trials, our prime-target pairs that were separated by intervening trials were not significant. These findings suggest follow-up studies to clarify the effects of structural priming in a long term setting.