The talk will cover rather broadly related issues - the priming of syntactic 
structures and the processing of syntactic variation. 

The experimental technique of syntactic priming is based on the phenomenon that 
people tend to reuse sentence structures and is used to explore the reality of mental 
linguistic representations - what can be primed must play a role psychologically. 
However, it is still unclear which information exactly can be primed. I will present a 
picture-description study which aimed to contribute to the disentangling of this puzzle by 
priming structures different in word order while controlling for other potentially relevant 
structures (i.e. syntactic categories and animacy).

The second part of the talk will deal with the comprehension of syntactic 
variation. Languages provide different kinds of syntactic alternatives (e.g., word orders 
and alternations). Linguistically, a lot of work has been done on the kinds and importance 
of constraints regulating the choice between these variants. From a cognitive perspective, 
it is interesting to study the difference in processing effort for the different structures as 
well as the interaction of different constraints (e.g., in terms of licensing unpreferred 
variants and anticipating upcoming referents). I will present experimental possibilities for 
testing some of these interactions.