When being patient leads to finishing first: influences of visual and syntactic priming in German

Kerstin Hadelich

In order to clarify the mental representations of linguistic knowledge, priming has become a useful (and often used) method. Syntactic priming in particular has been mostly applied to address structures such as datives and passives. The pattern for datives seems to be relatively homogeneous. However, passives do not appear to be equally easy to influence: After several studies in English, other experiments failed to reproduce a syntactic priming for passive constructions in languages other than English (e.g. in Dutch: Hartsuiker & Kolk, 1998). In this talk I will present data from visual and syntactic priming experiments investigating the primeability of passives in German speaking participants. In addition to priming effects on the sentence structure used, results of the analyses of paticipants' eye-movements will be reported.