Mapping concepts to syntax: Evidence from structural priming in Mandarin Chinese

Cai, Zhenguang G., Pickering, Martin J. and Branigan, Holly P. (2012) Mapping concepts to syntax: Evidence from structural priming in Mandarin Chinese. Journal of Memory and Language, 66 (4). 833–849. ISSN 0749-596X

Full text not available from this repository.

Abstract

Theories of how people construct linguistic form during production are largely based on English and closely related languages. We report three experiments that used a structural priming paradigm to investigate grammatical encoding in Mandarin Chinese, in particular the way conceptual information is mapped onto grammatical structure. The results show that, in addition to persisting in using the same syntactic form across utterances, speakers of Mandarin persisted in their mappings from conceptual elements to syntactic elements, including both grammatical functions and linear surface word order positions. The results thus argue against a two-stage model where conceptual representations are first mapped onto grammatical functions, which are then in turn mapped onto surface linear positions. Instead, the results support a one-stage model where the processor computes in a single stage a structure that specifies both the linear order and the grammatical functions of its constituents.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	language production,syntax,word order,thematic role,structural priming,chinese
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Psychology
Depositing User:	Pure Connector
Date Deposited:	25 Nov 2016 16:17
Last Modified:	22 Oct 2022 01:55
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/61494
DOI:	10.1016/j.jml.2012.03.009

Actions (login required)

View Item