Structural priming during comprehension: A pattern from many pieces

Syntactic/structural priming has been shown to take place during comprehension. However, early comprehension findings revealed discrepancies with those in production, such as little to no abstract priming, yet readily observable lexically-mediated priming. These observations spurred important questions about whether structural processing is more lexically dependent during comprehension, whether abstract priming occurs at all during comprehension, and whether the mechanisms of structural facilitation are shared across these two modalities. The past decade has fortunately yielded many influential structural priming studies in comprehension, including those that seek to bridge the gap between structural processing across production and comprehension. This review serves to summarize recent findings that provide compelling evidence that abstract structural priming and learning do take place in comprehension, and that these effects show parity with those found in production. Competing mechanistic explanations of structural priming are also reviewed and considered in light of findings in both modalities. Lastly, a summary is provided that outlines future lines of inquiry needed to establish a better understanding of structural representation, priming, and learning in comprehension, and more generally.