Syntactic priming in language production

People have a tendency to repeat the types of sentences they use during lan guage production. Recent experimental work has shown that this phenomenon i s at least partly due to 'syntactic priming', whereby the act of processing an utterance with a particular form facilitates processing a subsequent ut terance with the same or a related form. In this review, we first provide a n overview of the evidence for syntactic priming. The review will then expl ore the implications of this research for three different areas of language theory: the possible functional significance of syntactic priming in coord inating speakers during dialogue, the mechanisms underlying sentence produc tion, and the nature of linguistic representation.