Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Structural priming occurs when interlocutors copy the syntactic structure of their partners’ utterances, and is di-agnostic of their underlying representations. We trained adult participants on an artificial ‘alien’ language in which nounsappeared with adjectives or numerals in two-word phrases; participants then used that language to communicate with an alieninterlocutor. Input languages had variable word-order with the two modifier types tending to appear on the same side of thenoun (harmonic) or on different sides of the noun (non-harmonic). Participants in all conditions acquired the dominant or-der of their input; however, structural priming only occurred within modifier types (e.g. encountering Numeral-Noun primedNumeral-Noun order only, not Adjective-Noun), even for participants exposed to harmonic input where both modifier typespatterned the same way. This suggests that the abstract representations tapped by structural priming in rapidly-learnt artificiallanguages encode distinctions that are not based purely on distributional properties of the input.