Syntactic priming in experimental linguistics

Abstract

This paper describes the phenomenon of syntactic priming, that is, the speaker’s tendency to repeat the syntactic construction of an utterence used by himself or his interlocutor shortly before. The main theoretical concepts, experimental methodology, syntactic material, the so-called lexical boost effect, differences in results when using speech production or comprehension methods are considered, as well as the main theoretical models of syntactic priming. Experiments with bilinguals are described in detail. The results of the study of Russian possessive constructions are presented.

Keywords

• implicit memory
• priming
• syntactic priming
• experiment
• lexical boost effect
• bilingua
• russian