Syntactic Persistence in Dutch

Abstract

Three experiments are reported that showed effects of “structure priming,” the tendency to repeat syntactic structure across successive sentences. These effects were demonstrated in a previously untested language, Dutch. All experiments studied spoken sentence production. Importantly, pre-experimental baselines were measured for all target structures in order to assess possible effects of frequency on the magnitude of priming effect. We obtained priming with dative sentences, including datives with medially placed prepositional phrases, a sentence type not tested before. In one experiment we obtained priming effects with passives, including passives with sentence-final verbs, which also have never been tested before. However, we failed to obtain priming effects with active transitives. A comparison with the baseline data suggested that priming is not related to baseline frequency. Further, the results allowed us to draw an empirical generalization: Structure priming is a relatively long-term event, lasting at least several trials. The implications of these findings are discussed.