Journal of P.wcholing~dstic Research, Iiol. 24, No. 6, 1995 Syntactic Priming: Investigating the Mental Representation of Language Holly P. Branigan, ~,6 Martin J. Pickering, 2 Simon P. Liversedge, 3 Andrew J. Stewart, 4 and Thomas P. Urbach s Accepted August 11, 1995 We argue that psycholinguistics should be concerned with both the representation and the processing of language. Recent experimental work on syntax in language compre- hension has largely concentrated on the way in which language is processed, and has assumed that theoretical linguistics serves to determine the representation of language. In contrast, we advocate experimental work on the mental representation of grammatical knowledge, and argue that syntactic printing is a promising way to do this. Syntactic priming is the phenomenon whereby exposure to a sentence with a particular syntactic construction can affect the subsequent processing of an otherwise unrelated sentence with the same (or, perhaps, related) structure, for reasons of that sD-ucture. We assess evidence for .Lvntactic priming in corpora, and then consider experimental evidence for priming in production and conwrehension, and for bidirectional priming between com- prehension and production. This in particular strongly suggests that priming is tapping into linguistic ~77owledge itself and is not just facilitating particular processes. The final section discusses the importance of priming evidence for any account of language con- strued as the mental representation of human linguistic capacities. The order of the first two authors is arbitrary. H.B. is supported by an EPSRC Post- graduate Studentship. M.P. is supported by a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship. S.L. is supported by a University of Nottingham Postdoctoral Fellowship. A.S. was sup- ported by British Academy Research Grant awarded to M.P.T.U. is in part supported by a Mellon Science Development Grant. We would like to thank Dave Elmes, Tyler Lorig, Matt Traxler, an anonymous reviewer, and members of the Sentence Processing Group, Human Communication Research Centre, Universities of Edinburgh and Glas- gow. University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9LW, United Kingdom. 2 University of Glasgow, Glasgow GI2 9YR, United Kingdom. 3 University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2RD, United Kingdom. University of Sussex, Brighton BN 1 7QG, United Kingdom. -~ Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia 24450. Now at Binghamton Uni- versity, New York 13902. Address all correspondence to Holly P. Branigan, Centre for Cognitive Science, Uni- versity of Edinburgh, 2 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LW, United Kingdom. 489 0090-6905/95/1100-0489507.50/0 9 1995 Plenum Publishing Corporation