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Updated: Oct 23, 2025

Examining Online Syntactic Processing of Spoken Complex Sentences in Chinese Using Dual-Modal Interference Tasks
Published on: September 5, 2019
When the independence of syntactic representation meets the sentence processing of Mandarin: Evidence from syntactic
Keshu Xiang1, Hui Chang1, Lu Sun2
1School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China.
Abstract:
There is no consensus on whether syntactic representation is independent of semantic representation in Mandarin. In four experiments, we adopted the syntactic priming paradigm to investigate the independence of syntactic representation in Mandarin. Experiments 1 and 2 investigated the priming effects of double object construction (DO) and prepositional object construction (PO) with the ditransitive verb being repeated across the prime and target. Experiment 1 showed two-way priming effects of DO and PO. Experiment 2 showed that the syntactic priming effects persisted regardless of whether the semantic features (animacy of the Theme) matched across the prime and target or not. Furthermore, such effects persisted in Experiments 3 and 4 where the ditransitive verb across the prime and target was not repeated. Taken together, these findings provide evidence that syntactic/semantic independence is universal and favoured over the traditional Chinese grammar account, which claims that the syntactic representation of Mandarin is not independent of the semantic representation.
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