Although syntactic priming is well studied and
commonly assumed to involve implicit learning, the
mechanisms behind this phenomenon are still under
debate. We tested whether implicit learning of adjacent
and non-adjacent sequences occurs in a non-linguistic,
finger sequence task (Serial Reaction Time task), and if
so, whether these implicitly-learned dependencies can
cause syntactic priming in the linguistic domain. We
followed the logic that exposure to statistical patterns in
the SRT task may influence language users’ relative
clause (RC) attachment biases, and trained participants
on SRT sequences with adjacent or non-adjacent
dependencies. Participants then wrote completions to
relative clause fragments in a situation where they
could opt for adjacent or non-adjacent linguistic
structures. Participants successfully learned the adjacent
and non-adjacent dependency implicitly during the SRT
task, but, strikingly, their RC continuations did not
exhibit priming effects. Implications for theories of
syntactic priming and its relations to implicit learning
are discussed
