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There is strong evidence for syntactic priming in language production (Bock, 1986),but little evidence about the time course of such effects, Wereport an experiment that examined the circumstances under which syntactic priming decays in written language production, Participants completed sentence fragments that allowed completions with one of two syntactic forms (Pickering & Branigan, 1998). They tended to produce the same syntactic form for immediately consecutive fragments, even though the two fragments described different events, However, when the experimental fragments were separated by other fragments with unrelated syntactic forms, this tendency rapidly diminished. The results suggest that priming effects in written production decay rapidly when other structures are subsequently produced. Wediscuss the implications for the application of syntactic information during production.The order of the first two authors is arbitrary. We thank Stuart Boutell and Andrew Stewart for their assistance. This research was supported by a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship (awarded to H.P.B.) and ESRC Research Grant R000237418. Correspondence should be addressed to H. P. Branigan, Human Communication Research Centre, Department of Psychology, University of Glasgow, Florentine House, 53 Hillhead Street, Glasgow G 12 8QF, Scotland (e-mail: holly@psy.gla.ac.uk).Examples Ia and Ib describe the same situation, but involve different syntactic structures: In Ia, the verb sold is followed by a noun phrase (some cocaine) and a prepositional phrase (to an undercover agent); in Ib, the verb is followed by two noun phrases (an undercover agent and some cocaine). We call la a prepositional object (PO) sentence and I b a double object (DO) sentence. Participants then saw a picture that could be described using a PO or a DO construction (e.g., a girl handing a paintbrush to a man). The prime was not semantically re-A tendency to repeat syntactic structure during language production has been noted in dialogue (

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There is a large body of accumulated evidence from behavioral and neuroimaging studies regarding how and where in the brain we represent basic numerical information. A number of these studies have considered how numerical representations may differ between individuals according to their age or level of mathematical ability, but one issue rarely considered is whether the representational acuity or automaticity of using numerical representations differs between the sexes. We report 4 studies that suggest that male participants show a stronger influence of the spatial representation of number as revealed through the spatial numerical association of response codes (SNARC) effect, through the numerical distance effect (NDE), and through number-line estimations. Evidence for a sex difference in processing number was present for parity decisions (Experiment 1), color decisions (Experiment 2), number-line estimations (Experiment 3), and magnitude decisions (Experiment 4). We argue that this pattern of results reflects a sex difference in either the acuity of representation or reliance upon spatial representations of number, and that this difference may arise due to differences in the parietal lobes of men and women.