In two structural priming experiments, participants read a Dutch prime sentence aloud, followed by a Dutch target fragment that they had to complete using pictures. Prime sentences were either double object (DO) or prepositional object (PO) ditransitive structures such as “Gauw bracht de arts de masseur een handdoek/een handdoek aan de masseur” (Quickly brought doctor the masseur a towel/a towel to the masseur). Targets consisted of sentence fragments that could be completed using either a DO or PO structure (e.g., “Onlangs leende de boxer …” Recently lent the boxer … with pictures of a boxer, shirt and football). In Experiment 1, we manipulated (1) the prime structure (DO or PO) and (2) whether the prime and target had the same subject noun (e.g., boxer). In Experiment 2, we manipulated whether the prime and target had the same verb (e.g., leende) or not, in addition to manipulating the prime structure. In both experiments, we scored whether participants completed the target fragments with a prepositional object or double object structure and used this as the dependent measure.Previous research (Carminati, Van Gompel, & Wakeford, 2019) has shown that structural priming is stronger when the verb that is the syntactic head of the primed structure is repeated between prime and target than when it is not, whereas the repetition of other words does not boost priming. One possible explanation is that in this research, the verb immediately preceded the primed structure, whereas the other words did not. Only when the repeated word immediately precedes the primed structure, this word may be sufficiently activated to boost priming. In the current experiments, we tested structural priming in ditransitive structures in Dutch where the subject noun immediately preceded the primed structure, whereas the verb did not (e.g., Gauw bracht de arts de masseur een handdoek/een handdoek to the masseur, “Quickly brought the doctor the masseur a towel/a towel to the masseur”). Experiment 1 investigated whether repetition of the subject noun (e.g., arts, “doctor”) boosted structural priming and Experiment 2 investigated whether repetition of the verb (e.g., bracht, “brought”) did. Structural priming was stronger when the verb was repeated between the prime and target (Experiment 2), but not when the subject noun was (Experiment 1). We conclude that the recency of the repeated word relative to the primed structure does not affect the lexical boost and that the lexical boost only occurs with the repetition of the syntactic head of the primed argument structure.

Behavioural experiment. Participants were recruited using Prolific. They were all native speakers of Dutch, resident in Belgium or The Netherlands, had no language-related disorders and were between 18 and 45 years of age. Forty-eight participants took part in each experiment. The study was approved by the University of Dundee ethics committee and all participants gave informed consent to take part in the study. In both experiments, participants read a prime sentence aloud and next completed a target sentence fragment using pictures.