Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Four structural priming experiments investigated the lexical boost effect in structural priming. In two experiments, wetested whether repeating the subject in prepositional object or double object ditransitive structures boosted structuralpriming. In two other experiments, we manipulated the repetition of the verb. Repetition of the subject noun affectedstructural priming, but only when the prime remained visible while participants produced the target sentence. In contrast,repetition of the verb boosted priming regardless of whether participants could see the prime and target simultaneously.We conclude that the subject noun repetition effect is more strategic in nature than the verb boost effect. Structures areautomatically associated with the verb, their syntactic head, whereas repetition of the subject noun only affects priming ifthe presentation method makes the repetition highly explicit.