The Persistence of Structural Priming Transient Activation or Implicit Learning?

• Published in: Journal of experimental psychology. General Vol. 129; no. 2; pp. 177 - 192
• Main Authors: Bock, Kathryn, Griffin, Zenzi M
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States American Psychological Association 01-06-2000
• Subjects: Adult; Attention; Cognitive Processes; Experiments; Female; Human; Humans; Learning; Male; Memory; Mental Recall; Pattern Recognition, Visual; Priming; Procedural Knowledge; Psycholinguistics; Psychology; Semantics; Short Term Memory; Students - psychology; Verbal Behavior
• ISSN: 0096-3445; 1939-2222
• DOI: 10.1037/0096-3445.129.2.177

Structural priming in language production is a tendency to
recreate a recently uttered syntactic structure in different words.
This tendency can be seen independent of specific lexical items,
thematic roles, or word sequences. Two alternative proposals about
the mechanism behind structural priming include (a) short-term
activation from a memory representation of a priming structure and
(b) longer term adaptation within the cognitive mechanisms for
creating sentences, as a form of procedural learning. Two
experiments evaluated these hypotheses, focusing on the persistence
of structural priming. Both experiments yielded priming that endured
beyond adjacent sentences, persisting over 2 intervening sentences
in Experiment 1 and over 10 in Experiment 2. Although memory may
have short-term consequences for some components of this kind of
priming, the persisting effects are more compatible with a learning
account than a transient memory account.