Lexical Priming
Lexical Priming is the theory, developed by Michael Hoey in Lexical Priming: A New Theory of Words and Language (2005), that every encounter with a word or sequence cumulatively loads it with the contexts and co-texts in which it has been met, and that this loading is what speakers draw on when they produce and comprehend language. Grammar, in this account, is not a separate system applied to lexis; it is the residue of a lifetime of primings.
The Central Claim
Hoey's formulation: "As a word is acquired through encounters with it in speech and writing, it becomes cumulatively loaded with the contexts and co-texts in which it is encountered, and our knowledge of it includes the fact that it co-occurs with certain other words in certain kinds of context. The same applies to word sequences built out of these words; these too become loaded with the context and co-text in which they occur" (2005, p. 8).
Knowing a word, on this view, is knowing its company: its common collocates, its typical grammatical patterns (colligations), its semantic associations, its pragmatic uses, its preferred genres and text positions. The priming is not a rule about the word; it is a history of occurrences that biases future production and interpretation.
How It Differs From Psycholinguistic Priming
The two senses of priming are related but distinct. The experimental psycholinguistic effect is short-term activation: hearing doctor speeds recognition of nurse seconds later. Hoey's Lexical Priming is the long-term sedimented result of repeated activations, a theory of what a speaker's lexicon is rather than a description of a momentary effect. The experimental effect is evidence for the theoretical claim, not identical with it.
Implications for Corpus-Informed Teaching
Because primings are built from exposure, their distribution in a speaker's lexicon tracks the distribution in the input. Corpus frequency is therefore not merely descriptive but constitutive: high-frequency collocates are high-frequency precisely because they have been primed that way in the speech community.
This gives corpus-informed pedagogy a theoretical spine. Teaching make a decision, not make plus decision, is not a stylistic preference; it is an attempt to align the learner's emerging primings with the primings of proficient users.
Implications for L2 Learners
For learners surrounded by the target language, primings accumulate inductively through use, the immersion case. For learners who lack that environment, Hoey notes that "other strategies need to be used" (2005, p. 184). Rote memorisation of whole texts is one such strategy: the memorised text becomes a dense, self-contained source of primings that productive use can later draw on. Ding's (2007) Chinese informants who retained sentence patterns from New Concept English into adulthood are the pedagogical limit case.
Lexical Priming also reframes the "native / non-native" binary. As Hoey puts it, the relevant distinction is not who the speaker is but how the primings came into being. Speakers with rich, inductively acquired primings and speakers with carefully curated, instruction-built primings are doing the same cognitive work from different inputs.
Limits and Criticisms
- The theory is strong on what a speaker's lexicon looks like and weaker on how competing primings are resolved in real-time production.
- It sits comfortably with usage-based SLA and corpus linguistics but does not, on its own, generate a teaching method.
- Claims about priming are often easier to demonstrate at the collocational level than at the level of longer sequences, where the interaction with genre and discourse structure complicates the picture.
References
- Hoey, M. (2005). Lexical Priming: A New Theory of Words and Language. London: Routledge.
- Hoey, M. (2004). The textual priming of lexis. In G. Aston, S. Bernardini & D. Stewart (eds.), Corpora and Language Learners. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
- Ding, Y. (2007). Text memorisation and imitation: The practices of successful Chinese learners of English. System, 35, 271–80.