Syntactic priming in German sentence production

Current theories of language production tend to differentiate between a (syntactic) functional level and a (surface) positional level in the generation of sentences, where functional selection precedes and constrains positional processing. In this paper, we present evidence from a syntactic priming study in German, where position, function, and type of constituent are orthogonally specified for monotransitive and ditransitive verbs. In contrast to findings for English tin which these factors are confounded) we show that previous generation of a ditransitive structure can inhibit the production of a further ditransitive when the order of potential arguments differs between prime and target. Our results suggest that positional processing must at the least interact with functional processing in production, and point to the importance of cross-linguistic evidence in the formation of models of language processing.