Structural Priming as Implicit Learning in Language Acquisition: The Persistence of Lexical and Structural Priming in 4-Year-Olds

Savage et al. (2003) found that 4-year-old children are subject to sentence-level structural priming in conditions of high lexical overlap between prime and target. The present study investigated whether the process of priming also leads to significant implicit learning. Forty-four English-speaking 4-year-old children were asked to describe a prime picture by repeating a passive sentence, and then they were left to their own devices to describe a target picture. Some children were exposed to a prime set consisting of identical passive sentences across items, whereas others received varied passive sentences (using different verbs) across items. There were 2 main findings. First, varied primes were significantly more effective than identical primes in eliciting passive sentences from the children, showing both a greater immediate effect and a longer lasting effect (varied primes, but not identical primes, were still effective after a week). Second, the effect of the varied primes persisted for up to a month, but only for those children who received the opportunity to name pictures at the 1-week interval (reinforcement). These results provide the first evidence that priming in young children is sensitive to variation across the prime set and that it can be quite long lasting, suggesting that during the priming session children are also learning and so modifying their linguistic representations.