Role of repetition on structural priming (Lee et al., 2025)

Purpose: Structural priming—speakers’ unconscious tendency to reuse previously encountered sentence structures (primes) in future production—facilitates access and learning of grammatical representations in persons with aphasia (PWAs). However, it remains unclear which components of structural priming tasks are essential to consistent and lasting effects, a discovery critical for cost-effective clinical translation of research. We examined the effects of orally repeating versus listening to primes on immediate and lasting sentence production in PWAs and controls.

Method: In a collaborative priming task, participants took turns with the experimenter, describing transitive and dative event pictures. One group of PWAs and controls listened to the experimenter’s descriptions (primes) before they described their own picture, whereas the other group orally repeated their interlocutor’s prime sentences before the target picture descriptions. In Experiment 1, the target picture description was elicited immediately after the prime (0-lag, immediate priming). In Experiment 2, two filler trials (2-lag) intervened between prime and target, examining longer term priming.

Results: At both immediate and longer term priming, significant priming effects were observed in both groups, as indicated by increased productions of passives following passive versus active primes and increased productions of double-object dative sentences following double-object than prepositional object dative prime sentences. However, orally repeating prime sentences did not reliably and consistently enhance the magnitude of priming effects across lags and groups. Additionally, PWAs’ repetition abilities did not result in higher degrees of priming effects.

Conclusion: These findings suggest that opportunities for processing syntactic representations that shared between prior (prime) and current (target) utterances is a rather essential ingredient for positive structural priming in PWAs, while repeating prime sentences is an optional ingredient that can be removed or modified.

Supplemental Material S1. Supplemental tables.

Lee, J., Man, G., Christ, S., & Zhang, P. (2025). Structural priming for sentence production in aphasia: What does oral repetition do? Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 68(3), 1161–1174. https://doi.org/10.1044/2024_JSLHR-24-00216