Semantic and Syntactic Constraints on Syntactic Priming.
Verbs remember their complements in language production.
Manuscript under revision. Two experiments investigate the impact of a single use of a verb with one of its complements on future access to the verb and its complements in sentence production. The verbs tested included optional transitives such as fight, verbs that take either a sentence or a noun phrase complement such as reveal, and verbs that may be used intransitively or with sentence complements such as joke. In Experiment 1, speakers showed equivalent structural priming for all 3 verb classes. The results suggest that verb biases are modifiable by a single use and support the idea of common experience-sensitive syntactic representations for comprehension and production.