Syntactic priming in written production: Evidence for rapid decay

There is strong evidence for syntactic priming in language production (Bock , 1986), but little evidence about the time course of such effects. We repo rt an experiment that examined the circumstances under which syntactic prim ing decays in written language production. Participants completed sentence fragments that allowed completions with one of two syntactic forms (Pickeri ng & Branigan, 1998). They tended to produce the same syntactic form for im mediately consecutive fragments, even though the two fragments described di fferent events. However, when the experimental fragments were separated by other fragments with unrelated syntactic forms, this tendency rapidly dimin ished. The results suggest that priming effects in written production decay rapidly when other structures are subsequently produced. We discuss the im plications for the application of syntactic information during production.