Structural priming: A critical review.

“…evidence that both languages are, to various degrees, simultaneously active in the mind of bilinguals (e.g., Hartsuiker et al., 2004; Deuchar, 2005; Pickering and Ferreira, 2008; Coppock, 2010; Hsin et al., 2013; Kroll and Gollan, 2014; Melinger et al., 2014; Starreveld et al., 2014; de Groot,…”

“…has shown that speakers can be induced (or ‘‘primed’’) to repeat particular structures in controlled settings as well (e.g., Bock, 1986; Bock & Loebell, 1990; Hartsuiker, Kolk, & Huiskamp, 1999; Pickering & Branigan, 1998; Potter & Lombardi, 1998; see Pickering & Ferreira, 2008, for an overview).”

“That is, at least part of the structural priming effect appears to be driven by repetition of syntactic structure and cannot be fully accounted for by repetition of other representational levels (see Pickering & Ferreira, 2008).”

“It has been observed that priming effects in comprehension appear to be weaker, or more difficult to obtain, than corresponding priming effects in production (Pickering & Ferreira, 2008), in line with the findings in the present paper.”

“Given that numerous studies of healthy speakers have reported reliable implicit priming effects (Pickering & Ferreira, 2008), the limited priming effects for control speakers in Hartsuiker and Kolk (1998)'s study make the comparison with agrammatic speakers difficult to interpret.”

“This could reflect an inverse-preference effect (see Pickering & Ferreira, 2008), whereby priming magnitudes tend to be smaller for generally preferred linguistic structures.”

“(For an overview of structural priming, see Pickering and Ferreira, 2008.)”

“1 We follow Pickering and Ferreira (2008) and use the term structural”

“One of the central issues in production research is how speakers decide which entity to assign to which grammatical function (Blumenthal, 1970; Bock & Ferreira, in press; Bock & Levelt, 1994; Pickering & Ferreira, 2008).”

“If this was merely an isolated oddball finding then it might be of little consequence, but all simple reading tasks reveal such complicated patterns of interaction among the factors that reading scientists study (see [8,9] for reviews and discussions).”

“Most of the evidence for structural priming suggests that syntactic choices are persistent, independent of whether there is overlap in other linguistic representations (Pickering & Ferreira, 2008 ).”

“…structural representation and processing has advanced considerably in the past few decades, thanks in large part to structural priming studies (see Pickering & Ferreira, 2008, for a review), and the various paradigms they have contributed (e.g., Arai et al., 2007; Bock, 1986; Branigan et al.,…”

“Structural priming has been documented in many languages with a wide variety of structures (see Pickering & Ferreira, 2008, for review), using both experimental techniques and through the analysis of more naturalistic corpus data (Gries, 2005; Weiner & Labov, 1983).”

“The results of priming experiments have been used to argue for the existence of representations that are abstracted away from superficial properties of the sentence (e.g., Bock, 1986; Pickering & Ferreira, 2008).”

“If speakers can choose between alternative structures, and if one of these structures has been previously activated, they are likely to reuse this structure in the unfolding discourse (see Pickering & Ferreira, 2008, for a review of research on structural priming).”

“In the current paper, we examine the nature of shared representations across cognitive domains through the use of the structural priming technique, a behavioural method that is widely used within psycholinguistics (see Pickering & Ferreira, 2008, for a review).”

“Since Bock (1986), researchers have known that speakers repeat syntactic form across utterances (see Pickering & Ferreira, 2008).”

“…due to an increasing focus on the patient, then ‘‘speakers should describe target pictures with any sort of structures in which patients are prominent (e.g. the church is burning), and not just passive structures specifically (the church was hit by lightning) ’’ (Pickering & Ferreira, 2008: 429).”

“While the most commonly used term in the literature is syntactic alignment, ‘structural priming’ is the terminology preferred by Pickering and Ferreira [51].”

“Many adult studies (see Pickering & Ferreira, 2008; for a review) have shown that hearing a passive sentence increases the likelihood of subsequently producing a passive sentence, regardless of the particular verb used (and regardless of its consistency with Pinker’s proposed semantic constraint).”

“…fact, recent evidence using structural priming paradigms has suggested that bilingual speakers who are proficient in both of their languages do have shared representations for syntactic structures that are sufficiently similar between their two languages (see Pickering & Ferreira, 2008).”

“Data from this technique are typically used to test theories on priming and interactive alignment between interlocutors in dialogue (see e.g., Pickering & Ferreira, 2008, for more information).”

“Syntactic priming is the tendency to repeat aspects of syntactic structures across otherwise unrelated sentences, such that prior processing of a particular syntactic structure facilitates subsequent processing of the same structure (see Branigan, 2007; Pickering & Ferreira, 2008, for reviews).”

“…appears to facilitate subsequent construction of the same form, even when the referents and lexical content changes (Bock, 1986; Feiman & Snedeker, 2016; Huttenlocher, Vasilyeva, & Shimpi, 2004; Raffray & Pickering, 2010; Thothathiri & Snedeker, 2008; see Pickering & Ferreira, 2008 for review).”

“…the course of the experiment; and a binary variable indicating whether the sentence structure of the confederate turn was re-used in the response turn, since processing load might be influenced by structural priming (Pickering & Ferreira, 2008; Segaert, Menenti, Weber, Petersson, & Hagoort, 2012).”

“Such a cross-lingual analysis of scientific metaphors in translation is expanded further in Shuttleworth (2017).”

“This is in contrast to a choice syntactic priming task, in which participants are typically asked to describe pictures that could be described using multiple syntactic alternatives (Pickering and Ferreira, 2008).”

“Such syntactic priming effects appear to be based on facilitation of particular constituent structures through prior exposure (see Branigan, 2007; Pickering & Ferreira, 2008, for reviews).”

“Even better evidence would be if success or training on one task causally affects performance on another – a kind of structural priming approach (Pickering & Ferreira, 2008) applied to the study of infants.”

“…no way of accounting for short-term relational priming (e.g., Estes & Jones, 2006; Popov & Hristova, 2015) and structural priming (e.g., Bock, 1986; Pickering & Ferreira, 2008; Popov & Hristova, 2014) or for the retrieval of relationally similar structures from LTM. Finally, while recent…”

“Also in light of theories seeing alignment as a form of implicit learning (cf. review Pickering & Ferreira, 2008), this six-turn threshold might be in need of revision.”

“We used lexical alignment as a covariate in our ANCOVA model, to correct for a phenomenon called the ‘lexical boost effect’ (Pickering & Ferreira, 2008).”

“Since the classic demonstrations of syntactic priming in language production (e.g., Bock, 1986), numerous production studies have shown robust priming effects on syntactic choice using a variety of structures (see Pickering & Ferreira, 2008 for review).”

“Findings have shown that structural priming does not depend on the repetition of function words, thus in humans there is a clear difference between content-word and function word repetition (Bock, 1989; Tree and Meijer, 1999; Pickering and Ferreira, 2008).”

“Such effects occur for many languages, with many paradigms, and for different constructions (see Pickering & Ferreira, 2008).”

“Future research should examine the impact of text properties such as the sentences’ lexical and syntactic structural relationships ( 63 ) in addition to coherence in modulating model-brain alignment.”

“Structural priming effects have been observed in humans both within a given language (Bock, 1986; Ferreira and Bock, 2006; Pickering and Ferreira, 2008; Dell and Ferreira, 2016; Mahowald et al., 2016; Branigan and Pickering, 2017) and crosslin-gually (Loebell and Bock, 2003; Hartsuiker et al.,…”

“It has also been described as an instance of structural priming (e.g., Pickering & Ferreira, 2008; Pickering & Garrod, 2004), wherein the syntactic patterns in one interactant’s utterances are automatically and unconsciously taken up in the other interactant’s utterances.”

“…implicit language learning throughout a lifespan (Bock & Griffon, 2000; Bock, Dell, Chang, & Onishi, 2007; Branigan, Pickering, Steward, & McLean, 2000; Chang, Dell, Bock, & Griffin, 2000; Chang, Dell, & Bock, 2006; see Pickering & Ferreira, 2008, for different accounts of structural priming).”

“Humans exhibit structural priming (e.g. Pickering and Branigan, 1999; Pickering and Ferreira, 2008)— a tendency to reproduce syntactic structures that they have recently encountered.”

“(Pickering and Ferreira, 2008)).”

“However, as with word order, it is a subject of debate whether speakers tend to parallel the meaning or the form of the respective constructions (for a comprehensive overview see Pickering & Ferreira, 2008).”

“…activation and learning are complementary facets of structural priming (Branigan, 2006; Chang, Dell, & Bock, 2006; Ferreira & Bock, 2006; Hartsuiker, Bernolet, Schoonbaert, & Speybroek & Vanderelst, 2008; Pickering & Ferreira, 2008; Reitter, Keller, & Moore, 2011; Tooley, Traxler, & Swaab, 2009).”

“Structural priming effects, whereby speakers repeat linguistic structure across otherwise unrelated sentences, can be informative about the nature of linguistic representations and the mappings between them (see Pickering & Ferreira, 2008, for discussion).”

“Structural priming is a robust phenomenon (see [25]), and it occurs largely outside of a speaker’s awareness [1].”

“…2008, for a comprehensive review): the largely unconscious repetition of structures (words or other linguistic representations at morphosyntactic, phonetic, pragmatic levels) that have been used in the conversation due to automatic activation of those structures (cf. Pickering & Garrod, 2004).”

“They found that several autoregressive LLMs assign greater probability to sentences that are similar in structure to their prefixes across a number of diverse constructions, thereby demonstrating a pattern analogous to what is known in psycholinguistics as structural priming (Bock, 1986; Pickering and Ferreira, 2008).”

“…specific syntactic structure, they have a tendency to re-use that syntactic structure in subsequent utterances (i.e., structural priming; see e.g., Pickering & Ferreira, 2008, for a review; see the JML special issue on New Approaches to Structural Priming [Dell & Ferreira, 2016], for recent…”

“Interlocutors use what they have just understood to guide what they produce, through repeating the in-terlocutor’s words and structure [62].”

“…(e.g., Costa et al., 2000; Van Hell and Dijkstra, 2002; Christoffels et al., 2007; Van Assche et al., 2009), and studies on interactive alignment and structural priming (e.g., Pickering and Garrod, 2004; Hartsuiker and Pickering, 2008; Kootstra et al., 2010, 2012; Van Gompel and Arai, 2018).”

“Moreover, structural priming was anticipated (and ultimately observed) in the generation task (see Pickering & Ferreira, 2008 for a recent review), originating from the sentence listening and sentence repetition task, and thus the sentences generated by participants were largely identical to those…”

“We specifically also controlled for (cumulative) syntactic priming, the phenomenon that the repetition of sentence structures alters and eases their subsequent processing [54,55].”

“The crucial finding, now replicated many times over (for a review, see [39]) is that participants are more likely to use a passive sentence to describe the target if the prime was passive than if the prime was active.”

“Much research has investigated people’s tendency to repeat sentence structures, often called syntactic priming (for a review, see Pickering & Ferreira, 2008).”

“Interspeaker adaptation has been termed accommodation, alignment, convergence, priming as well as synchrony, and has been reported in terms of pronunciation [1, 2], prosody [3, 4, 5, 6], lexicon [7, 8, 9] and syntax [10, 11].”

“As summarized by Pickering and Ferreira (2008), structural priming research targeting first language (L1) speakers has investigated a wide variety of issues in psycholinguistics, ranging from the nature of syntactic representations to the occurrence of structural alignment in conversation.”

“This process may be similar to the processes underlying syntactic priming during language production (Bock, 1986; Pickering & Ferreira, 2008), where a representation stays active after recent use and influences subsequent processing.”

“It also differs from priming effects (McNamara, 2005; Pickering & Ferreira, 2008), which tend to be viewed as non-targeted and rapidly decaying.”

“Structural priming, the tendency to repeat a previously encountered syntactic structure, has been widely used as a tool to measure children’s acquisition of syntax (for reviews, see Branigan & Pickering, 2017; Kidd, 2012; Pickering & Ferreira, 2008).”

“…while short-term priming results from residual activation of combinatorial lemma nodes (e.g. Pickering & Branigan, 1998) or from explicit memory of the prime sentence, which facilitates the retrieval and subsequent repetition of its structure (Ferreira & Bock, 2006; Pickering & Ferreira, 2008).”

“…have shown that structural priming occurs for many different structures, in many languages, and in a variety of contexts including spontaneous speech, written text, and experiments using several different paradigms (see Branigan, 2007, and Pickering & Ferreira, 2008, for comprehensive reviews).”

“…Irwin, 1980; Bates and Devescovi, 1989; Prat-Sala and Branigan, 2000), or priming aspects of structural configuration (Ferreira and Bock, 2006; Branigan, 2007; Pickering and Ferreira, 2008 for recent reviews), also exert strong influences on Subject assignment and the resulting structural choice.”

“This includes responsiveness to structural priming, a phenomenon that is well-documented in neurotypical speakers (Bock and Loebell, 1990; Pickering and Ferreira, 2008).”

“To address this issue, we turn to structural priming, or the tendency for people to repeat linguistic structure across otherwise unrelated sentences (see Branigan & Pickering, 2017 and Pickering & Ferreira, 2008, for reviews).”