A Review of Structural Priming

Abstract

With the development of second language acquisition research involving more and more disciplines, structural priming, as an experimental paradigm, can study the syntactic representation, language comprehension and production from the perspective of psychology. And then how all these processes in the language mechanism, a “black box” in the human brain is represented and processed can be attained. Therefore, the research of structural priming is of great significance to the study of both native language and second language, and even contributes to patients with aphasia. This review will examine how structural priming has been used to investigate the representation, comprehension and production of syntactic structures.