The role of event structure in language production: Evidence from structural priming in Chinese motion event descriptions

Abstract

The present study investigates the role of abstract event structure in Chinese speakers’ language production. Two experiments adopted a structural priming paradigm. Three types of prime sentences which varied in their conceptual overlap with target events and violated the normal positions (Experiment 1) or order (Experiment 2) of conceptual contents of motion events were designed to test whether they are potent enough to induce Chinese speakers to change their preference in encoding motion events. Results showed that conceptual overlap influenced Chinese speakers’ choices of conceptual information (manner and/or path mention), illustrating that abstract event structure is activated at the stage of Message Planning, consistent with the findings obtained from English speakers. The results from both language groups indicate that the activation of event structure during preverbal Message Planning is a cross-linguistic phenomenon. In addition, the present study also finds that Chinese speakers’ mapping of event structure to linguistic form has its own characteristics, illustrating that the process of mapping conceptual structure to linguistic form is language-specific. We argue that this language-specific encoding of motion events provides evidence that Chinese is an “equipollently-framed language”.