Questão 96853

A researcher is investigating the phenomenon of syntactic priming in L2 learners of English. The experiment involves participants describing a series of images after being exposed to a prime sentence. In one condition, the participant hears a prime sentence with a prepositional-object dative construction (e.g., 'The boy gave the book to the teacher'). Immediately after, they are shown an image depicting a girl throwing a ball to a dog and are asked to describe it. The researcher hypothesizes that the L2 learner will be more likely to use the same syntactic structure in their description (e.g., 'The girl threw the ball to the dog') rather than the double-object dative alternative ('The girl threw the dog the ball'). This tendency to reuse a recently encountered syntactic structure is a robust finding in psycholinguistics. Which cognitive mechanism is considered the primary driver of this structural persistence?