Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Repetition of linguistic structure plays a role in both language comprehension and production. Previously encountered structures are processed faster, and speakers tend to reuse them in new utterances—a phenomenon known as structural priming. According to one well-established interpretation of structural priming, linguistic input activates an underlying mental representation based on constituents, a syntactic unit derived from rule-based grammars (e.g., [[he]NP [hears [a sound]NP]VP]S). Here we ask whether structural priming can occur for non-constituent parts-of-speech fragments, such as pronoun verb determiner (e.g., he hears a). Across two preregistered phrasal decision experiments, we show that structural priming can occur at the level of three-word parts-of-speech sequences and in the absence of constituents. Using corpus analysis, we further show that structural priming of non-constituents also occurs in real-life dialogue. These results imply that constituent structure is not a necessary prerequisite for structural priming and provide a challenge to contemporary approaches to grammar.