Structural Priming: A New Perspective of Language Learning

Repetition, as a common phenomenon of behavior, has been made extensive use of to illustrate mental representations. In the world of language, such repetition can be massively observed as well, which is called structural priming, people’s preference to reuse or better process the present structure due to its syntactic similarity to the previously processed or produced structures. Research around structural priming has been explosively conducted in within-language and cross-language contexts since Bock firstly introduced structural priming into language field in 1986. Research on structural priming centralizes on the underlying driven mechanisms of structural priming and its occurrence and function in language production and comprehension. As researchers investigate structural priming deeper, it is necessary to assess the current status of the research on structural priming and make directions for future research. This review is to offer an overview of the recent research on structural priming and recommendations for future investigations. For deeper and more thorough investigation of structural priming, the author points out that researchers can dive into investigations of structural priming in different range of subject, especially in second language learners and probe into social influencing factors of the occurrence and magnitude of structural priming in a more natural experimental paradigm.