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Key points
- When you prime readers and listeners with a pattern in language, you ease and speed their comprehension.
- When you insert a syntactic prime, and repeat that syntax, you’re better able to make your words flow.
- How to tap the power of recurrent structure? Duplicate subjects and objects in successive sentences.
“Plop plop, fizz fizz, oh what a relief it is.” You might have thought that only the pill that goes with that jingle creates relief. But science suggests the jingle’s wording itself elicits relief. The repetitive syntactic pattern eases people’s processing of the meaning, and easier processing rewards people neurologically.[i]
Scientists call this mental assistance, cognitive facilitation. Professional writers and speakers use it all the time, in works highbrow and low. At the high end is poet Percy Bysshe Shelley[ii]:
“And the sunlight clasps the earth
And the moonbeams kiss the sea:
What is all this sweet work worth
If thou kiss not me?”
The first two lines mirror each other syntactically. The initial sentence and its reflection in the second—even if you’re oblivious to the repetition—allows the meaning of the second to dawn quicker. Or as scientists say, the first sentence’s pattern acts as a syntactic prime.[iii]
Parallel Power
This points to one of the simplest and easiest tricks to help you say things with more impact: Recast the flow of your words into repeating patterns. Create a prime and a follow-up (or two). You’ll do something writing teachers have long advocated. You’ll create a parallel structure—parallel in phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and overall expression.
Priming syntactically doesn’t rank high in artistic glamor. But we now know from science that it does rank high in effectiveness because it lubricates the flow of words into people’s minds. That gives you a straightforward means of writing or speaking that hooks people.[iv]
Why does priming work? Readers and listeners are always asking, What will this person say next? What will the next word be? The next phrase? The next sentence? The next chapter? The habit of predicting what’s next is universal. It’s a human obsession—and people read and listen at every tier of language structure.[v]
When you place a prime early on—a word or phraseology or sentence structure you plan to reuse—people take notice even if behind the curtain of their consciousness. They instantly and unknowingly place a predictive bet.[vi] And if they’re right, they reap a payoff in faster language processing.[vii]
Many experiments confirm this advantage. One small study by Uta Noppeney and Cathy Price at University College London asked 25 people to read blocks of text with and without syntactic primes. (Some blocks had repeating language structures; some did not.) People who read blocks with parallel patterns finished sentences faster, in roughly 2.0 versus 2.1 seconds.[viii]
Prime Plus
Sascha Topolinski at the University of Cologne did a simple experiment that reinforces yet other powers of a prime. He asked people to read short question-and-answer jokes and rate their funniness. His experiment had one manipulation: Some readers unknowingly received a verbal prime buried in an introductory part of the experiment, and some did not.[ix]
The prime was a “significant” word from the joke’s punchline. Each person was exposed to it one to 15 minutes beforehand. Having been exposed to this keyword, what do you think happened in people’s minds?
Here’s one joke: “What were the last words of a vampire?”
Answer: “Dawn!”
Okay, that’s an old one not worth a laugh out loud. But if Topolinski’s research holds, you just found it funnier than you otherwise would have because my third paragraph included “dawn” as a prime.
Topolinki’s readers rated jokes as funnier so long as they got the punchline prime more than a minute beforehand. Less than a minute and the prime didn’t work as a humor booster. In Topolinski’s mind, the primes helped people to solve the joke and to cognitively master the punchline.[x]
Jokes aside, priming is an underappreciated way to make your words more reader- and listener-friendly. When readers or listeners are primed, they don’t have to rev their language-processing machinery as much. Your prime is a heads up, and it gives them a head start in understanding.
Easy Peasy Patterns
Engaging people with syntactic priming often takes little skill. At the most basic, you can take advantage of it by starting or finishing successive sentences similarly. Here’s scientist Merlin Sheldrake, author of The Entangled Life, as he writes about the function of fungi:
“The story you hear about grain determines whether you end up with bread or beer. The story you hear about milk determines whether you end up with yogurt or cheese. The story you hear about apples determines whether you end up with sauce or cider.”[xi]
Such simple repetition. How could it matter? As you try to digest his meaning, however, you get a helping hand with cognitive facilitation. Sheldrake’s point becomes more accessible as he recycles his opening pattern. He has put the new wine of his content in old bottles, making that new wine that much more pleasurable to drink.
A second example: Nelson Mandela wrote in Long Walk to Freedom: “I was born free—free in every way that I could know: Free to play in the fields near my mother’s hut, free to swim in the clear stream that ran through my village, free to roast mealies under the stars and ride the broad backs of slow-moving bulls.”[xii]
Notice how an ordinary adjective—free—placed in a repeating structure creates an extra-ordinary prime.
So powerful are syntactic primes that they act on our minds for longer than you might guess. That was demonstrated in an experiment by Kristen Tooley and others at the University of Illinois and the University of California Davis. They showed that, after a syntactic prime, people read sentences with similar structures faster even after three syntactically different sentences intervened.[xiii]
Priming and the facilitation of repetition have their limits, of course. They can get boring. That’s why journalists say: “Repeat and vary.” But in everyday talk and text, an old structure conveying a new idea prevents cognitive indigestion. Here’s some more new wine in an old bottle: “Plop plop, fizz fizz, oh how friendly a pattern is.”
References
[i] That “processing fluency” activates neural rewards for readers is explained in the work by Piotr Winkielman and others. Piotr Winkielman et al., "The Hedonic Marking of Processing Fluency: Implications for Evaluative Judgment," The Psychology of Evaluation: Affective Processes in Cognition and Emotion 189 (2003).
[ii] Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Love’s Philosophy,” 1819.
[iii] For a recent review article on syntactic priming, see Kristen M Tooley, "Structural Priming During Comprehension: A Pattern from Many Pieces," Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 30, no. 3 (2023).
[iv] For an early article on this research, see Lyn Frazier et al., "Parallel Structure: A Source of Facilitation in Sentence Comprehension," Memory & Cognition 12 (1984).
[v] Sofia Frade et al., "Is Second Best Good Enough? An EEG Study on the Effects of Word Expectancy in Sentence Comprehension," Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 37, no. 2 (2022).
[vi] For a recent summary of how the brain works as a prediction engine, see J. Benjamin Hutchinson and Lisa Feldman Barrett, “The Power of Predictions: An Emerging Paradigm for Psychological Research,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 28, no. 3 (2019).
[vii] Joshua Snell and Jan Theeuwes, "A Story About Statistical Learning in a Story: Regularities Impact Eye Movements During Book Reading," Journal of Memory and Language 113 (2020).
[viii] People reading sentences with parallel syntax took 2.040 seconds to complete them versus 2.098 seconds for sentences with dissimilar syntax. See Uta Noppeney and Cathy J Price, "An fMRI Study of Syntactic Adaptation," Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 16, no. 4 (2004). For another, similar experiment, see Patrick Sturt, Frank Keller, and Amit Dubey, "Syntactic Priming in Comprehension: Parallelism Effects with and without Coordination," Journal of Memory and Language 62, no. 4 (2010).
[ix] Sascha Topolinski, "A Processing Fluency-Account of Funniness: Running Gags and Spoiling Punchlines," Cognition & Emotion 28, no. 5 (2014).
[x] Interestingly, Topolinksi found surprise is still critical. People primed with a keyword right before the joke found them less funny.
[xi] Merlin Sheldrake, The Entangled Life (New York: Random House, 2020), 206.
[xii] Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom (New York: Little Brown, 1994), 857.
[xiii] Kristen M Tooley et al., "Evidence for Priming across Intervening Sentences During on-Line Sentence Comprehension," Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 29, no. 3 (2014).
