Do writing and speaking employ the same syntactic representations?

Writing and speaking are clearly related activities, but the acts of production are different. To what extent are the underlying processes shared? This paper reports three experiments that use syntactic priming to investigate whether writing and speaking use the same mechanisms to construct syntactic form. People tended to repeat syntactic form between modality (from writing to speaking and speaking to writing) to the same extent that they did within either modality. The results suggest that the processor employs the same mechanism for syntactic encoding in written and spoken production, and that use of a syntactic form primes structural features concerned with syntactic encoding that are perceptually independent. We interpret the results in terms of current accounts of language production.