Abstract
There are only few reports on syntactic priming from highly inflected languages such as Slavic languages. Consequently, little is known about how the presence of different morphemes marking syntactic roles, such as case, interacts with syntactic priming.
This contribution reports on two experiments that opened investigations in the syntactic priming in Czech, a highly inflected Slavic language. Experiment 1 replicated the classic study by Bock, except that the OVS active sentences were used instead of passives in transitive sentence trials.
The experiment replicated a robust priming effect for dative-accusative ordering in ditransitive structures but found no priming of SVO vs. OVS word order.
The experiment included neutral primes, making it possible to establish that dative-accusative primes have no effect, but accusative-dative primes result in increased the use of this ordering in target sentences. Experiment 2 focused on dative-accusative structures only.
In one type of primes, nouns were chosen so that the dative and accusative case were marked with the same endings as in the target structures. In the other condition, the dative and accusative endings differed from the targets.
The preliminary results (N=36) suggest that the overlap between case-marking morphemes has no effect on the overall priming effects, confirming analogous findings on free function morphemes. Subsequent examination found that syntactic priming grew stronger across the experiment, which is in line with the learning accounts of priming.