June Kathryn Bock

Major figure in the study of the psychology of language. She is best known for proposing and demonstrating structural priming: a tendency of speakers to recreate a recently uttered syntactic structure, even across different individual words, meanings, and semantic roles. Structural priming provides the strongest evidence for the existence of abstract grammatical structures. Since her initial proposal in1986, she systematically pursued its psychological roots. She finds that structural priming holds over moderate delays, supporting a learning account over a short-term priming account. This suggests that structural priming processes may support grammar learning.