Constituent structure is formulated in one stage

In four syntactic priming experiments participants completed target fragments, as "prepositional object" Sentences (e.g. "The patient showed his leg to the doctor") or "double object" sentences (e.g. patient showed the doctor his leg") or used another non-ditransitive form. The syntactic form of a prime sentence affected the form of participants' target completions. Experiments 1 to 3 used written sentence completion. Experiment 1 demonstrated that printing is a two-way process by comparing "prepositional object" and "double object" priming conditions with a baseline condition containing an intransitive verb. Experiment 2 and 3 found that "shifted" primes (e.g.. "The racing driver showed to the helpful mechanic the problem with the car") did not prime the production of "prepositional object" sentence, but instead behaved like baseline primes, Experiment 4 found similar results to those of Experiment I in Spoken sentence production, where participants, repeated the prime bind then completed it. We interpret the results in terms of accounts that assume that constituent structure is formulated in one stage. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science (USA).