Definition:
In psycholinguistics, a speaker's tendency to reuse the syntactic structure of a previous utterance when given a choice between two different structures having roughly the same meaning.
Observations:
- "The persistence phenomenon is very likely of some benefit to the listener. . . . However, both Levelt and Kelter (1982) and Bock (1986) claimed that using previous structure is simply due to persistence within the syntactic system. It is not due to the speaker's decision that the listener would benefit by using the same structure again."
(Gary Dell and Paula Brown, "Mechanism for Listener-Adaptation in Language Production," in Bridges Between Psychology and Linguistics, ed. by D. Napoli and J. Kegl, Erlbaum, 1991) - "A recent study suggests that our ability to construct sentences may arise from . . . the same simple memory system that lets our dogs learn to sit on command.
"Scientists distinguish between procedural memory, which is relevant for learning skills such as how to swim, and declarative memory, which stores knowledge, including facts and memories of events, such as one’s birthday, says Victor S. Ferreira of the University of California, San Diego. To find out which system is at work when we form sentences, Ferreira and his team exploited a phenomenon called syntactic persistence--speakers tend to use the same grammatical pattern they have used or heard in previous sentences. . . .
"Both groups [four healthy individuals and four amnesic patients] tended to use the grammatical rules of the prime sentence when describing [a] picture; amnesic patients, however, did not remember that they had seen the sentence before. The fact that they still used its syntactic structure is surprising because it suggests that the procedural memory system is responsible for putting grammatical sentences together, Ferreira says."
(Nicole Branan, "Memory for Grammar." Scientific American, April 2009)
