Syntactic representation of missing-verb anomalous utterances in Mandarin: Evidence from structural priming.

Abstract

Theories of how people interpret utterances with verb-related anomalies are chiefly based on English, but relatively little is known about the syntactic representation of missing-verb anomalous utterances in Mandarin, which has strikingly different typological features. In the current study, two experiments in structural priming paradigm were carried out to investigate whether native Mandarin speakers reconstructed a full syntactic form of missing-verb anomalous utterances. Our study shows that the magnitude of priming following a missing-verb anomalous sentence is equivalent to that following an error-free sentence, indicating that native Mandarin speakers reconstruct a full syntactic representation of missing-verb anomalous utterances. The results thus provide robust evidence for the syntactic reconstruction account.