Syntactic Priming in German Sentence Production

Abstract

Current theories of language production tend to differentiate between a (syntactic) functional level and a (surface) posi- tional level in the generation of sentences, where functional selection precedes and constrains positional processing. In this paper, we present evidence from a syntactic priming study in German, where position, function, and type of constituent are orthogonally specified for monotransitive and ditransitive verbs. In contrast to findings for English (in which these fac- tors are confounded) we show that previous generation of a ditransitive structure can inhibit the production of a further ditransitive when the order of potential arguments differs be- tween prime and target. Our results suggest that positional pro- cessing must at the least interact with functional processing in production, and point to the importance of cross-linguistic ev- idence in the formation ofmodels of language processing.