What this construction needs is generalized

What is the nature of the knowledge that readers acquire as they learn to comprehend a novel construction in their native language? This question was explored in two experiments that examined the extent to which readers who learn a new construction are able to extend it to sentence contexts other than the one in which it initially appeared. Readers were trained on the needs construction (“The meal needs cooked given that dinner is in an hour”) and then were presented with examples of the construction in a different sentential context (“John thinks that what the meal needs is cooked given that dinner is in an hour”). The results show that readers have little difficulty comprehending the needs construction in the new context, even when the construction is used with a different verb. These findings are discussed with respect to theories of structural priming and sentence processing.