SYNTACTIC PRIMING - INVESTIGATING THE MENTAL REPRESENTATION OF LANGUAGE

We argue that psycholinguistics should be concerned with both the repr esentation and the processing of language. Recent experimental work on syntax in language comprehension has largely concentrated on the way in which language is processed and has assumed that theoretical lingui stics serves to determine the representation of language. In contrast, we advocate experimental work on the mental representation of grammat ical knowledge, and argue that syntactic priming is a promising way to do this. Syntactic priming is the phenomenon whereby exposure to a se ntence with a particular syntactic construction can affect the subsequ ent processing of an otherwise unrelated sentence with the same (or, p erhaps, related) structure, for reasons of that structure. We assess e vidence for syntactic priming in corpora, and then consider experiment al evidence for priming in production and comprehension and for bidire ctional priming between comprehension and production. This in particul ar strongly suggests that priming is tapping into linguistic knowledge itself; and is not just facilitating particular processes. The final section discusses the importance of priming evidence for any account o f language construed as the mental representation of human linguistic capacities.