The theoretical issues of syntactic priming

Syntactic priming (SP) refers to speaker's tendency to reuse in the current sentence (the target sentence) the syntactic structure of a priming sentence that was previously perceived or produced. In this paper, after recalling the initial experimental evidences of this effect, we review the arguments suggesting that this effect is not related to a tendency to reuse non-syntactic aspects of a sentence. Then we examine two factors influencing SP: the lexical similarity between the prime and the target, and the frequency of the priming structure. Secondly, we discuss the SP effect in the models of language production. We also consider which memory system is required to explain syntactic priming. Finally, we consider how SP can shed some light on the link between the syntactic representations in comprehension and in production.