Structural priming as implicit learning: A comparison of models of sentence production

Structural priming reflects a tendency to generalize recently spoken or hea rd syntactic structures to different utterances. We propose that it is a fo rm of implicit learning. To explore this hypothesis, we developed and teste d a connectionist model of language production that incorporated mechanisms previously used to simulate implicit learning. In the model, the mechanism that learned to produce structured sequences of phrases from messages also exhibited structural priming. The ability of the model to account for stru ctural priming depended on representational assumptions about the nature of messages and the relationship between comprehension and production. Modeli ng experiments showed that comprehension-based representations were importa nt for the model's generalizations in production and that nonatomic message representations allowed a better fit to existing data on structural primin g than traditional thematic-role representations.