Usage-based theories of syntax predict that words and
syntactic constructions are probabilistically interconnected. If
this is true, then words that occur in similar distributions of
syntactic constructions should prime each other. These effects
should be fine-grained; even small differences between the
syntactic distributions of pairs of words of the same
grammatical category should cause variation in priming. Prior
research from production suggests that this prediction should
hold even in tasks without any syntactic requirement. In this
study, we introduce a measure of the similarity between the
syntactic contexts in which two nouns occur. We show that this
similarity measure significantly predicts visual lexical decision
priming magnitudes between pairs of nouns. This finding is
consistent with the predictions of usage-based theories where
fine-grained similarity of syntactic usages between
prime-target pairs affects decision latencies, over and above
any effects attributable to semantic similarity.