Priming is swell, but it's far from simple

Abstract

Clearly, structural priming is a valuable tool for probing linguistic representation. But we don't think that the existing results provide strong support for Branigan & Pickering's (B&P's) model, largely because the priming effects are more confusing and diverse than their theory would suggest. Fortunately, there are a number of other experimental tools available, and linguists are increasingly making use of them.

Processing Verb-phrase Ellipsis through Structural Priming in Mandarin Chinese: Evidence from Mandarin Chinese among Chinese-English Bilinguals

“…(Cai & Liu, 2017). Nonetheless, similar to the results discussed above, it is pointed out that such effects in production could be due to the elicitation of sentences, which makes it vital to better understand such instability (Ziegler et al, 2017).…”

“…With regard to the second question, to move beyond the four perspectives discussed above, theoretical implications are addressed as follows. Priming, first of all, should be viewed as fluid and dynamic for representations considered as unstable forms in relation to the process of comprehension and production (Ziegler et al, 2017), as the stability of linguistic representations might affect the validity of structural priming in that priming can change the accounts being investigated. (Cai & Liu, 2017).…”

“…Furthermore, although some argue that such ellipsis could be both syntactically and semantically represented (Hankamer, 1979;Merchant, 2001), equally robust support for priming in accordance with the syntactically (Bock & Loebell, 1990;Cai et al, 2015;Branigan & Pickering, 2017) and semantically (Chang et al, 2003;Cai et al, 2012;Cai, et al, 2013; Cho-Reyes et al, 2016)represented accounts have been recognized across languages (Ziegler et al, 2017). To fill this void, this paper discusses how Mandarin-English bilinguals construct similar structures in both languages while comprehending sentences with missing arguments from existing literature and tries to expand the scope of discussion.…”

Structural priming is determined by global syntax rather than internal phrasal structure: Evidence from young and older adults.

“…Such evidence may be considered to support the assumption of structural priming models that repetition of global syntactic structure is what drives the priming effect. However, Ziegler, Snedeker, and Wittenberg (2017) question the complete abstractness of syntactic representations, and instead argue that combinatorial nodes must encompass some functional lexical content at a more internal level because it is possible to prime the use of function words. For example, speakers can be primed to mention or not mention the function word ‘that’ in an embedded clause sentence (e.g., “ The mechanic mentioned [that] the car could use a tune-up.…”