@inproceedings{lee-etal-2026-language,
    title = "Do Language Models Show Structural Priming Across Different Domains?",
    author = "Lee, So Young  and
      Scheinberg, Russell  and
      Agrawal, Ameeta",
    editor = "Ma, Martin Ziqiao  and
      Liu, Emmy  and
      Liu, Jing  and
      Chang, Tyler A.  and
      Fourtassi, Abdellah  and
      Warstadt, Alex  and
      Hahn, Michael  and
      Sun, Weiwei  and
      Shi, Freda",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Computational Developmental Linguistics ({CDL})",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Grand Hyatt Manchester San Diego, 1 Market Pl, San Diego, CA 92101",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.cdl-1.9/",
    pages = "37--51",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-428-6",
    abstract = "We test whether large language models show cross-domain structural priming by asking whether arithmetic expressions influence relative-clause attachment preferences. Experiment 1 examines English and French using materials based on prior psycholinguistic studies, and Experiment 2 extends the test to a larger multilingual dataset. Across both experiments, we find no robust priming effect. Instead, responses largely reflect baseline attachment preferences, which vary across languages and only partially align with human patterns. These findings suggest that, although language models show some structural sensitivity, they provide limited evidence of abstract structural generalization across domains."
}