Context, not grammar, is key to structural priming.

Trends Cogn Sci

School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, 8000 Aarhus, Denmark; Interacting Minds Centre, Aarhus University, Aarhus University, 8000 Aarhus, Denmark; Department of Psychology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA. Electronic address:

Published: August 2025


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Article Abstract

Structural priming - a change in processing after repeated exposure to a syntactic structure - has been put forward as evidence for the psychological reality of constituent structures derived from grammar. However, converging evidence from memory research, large language models (LLMs), and structural priming itself challenges the validity of mapping structural representations onto grammatical constituents and demonstrates structural priming in the absence of such structure. Instead of autonomous representations specified by grammar, we propose that contextual representations emerging from multiple constraints (e.g., words, prosody, gesture) underlie structural priming. This perspective accounts for existing anomalous findings, is supported by the strong dependence on lexical cues observed in structural priming, and suggests that future research should prioritize studying linguistic representations in more naturalistic contexts.

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2025.05.016DOI Listing

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