The joint influence of event structure and syntactic usage preferences on syntactic choice: Evidence from structural priming of Chinese transitive events.

Authors

Lin Lin, Chen Zhao

Published in

Canadian journal of experimental psychology = Revue canadienne de psychologie experimentale. Aug 10, 2026. Epub Aug 10, 2026.

Abstract

While structural priming effects are well documented, their relationship with abstract event structures remains controversial. This study examines how event structure and syntactic usage preferences jointly influence syntactic choice in sentence production, using structural priming of Chinese transitive events. Across three experiments, Chinese participants read aloud priming sentences (displayed alongside event pictures) and then described target pictures. The priming and target events were manipulated as identical, similar, or dissimilar. Half of the priming sentences used verbal predicate structures, while the other half employed high-preferred ba-constructions (Experiment 1), medium-preferred bei-constructions (Experiment 2), or low-preferred gei-constructions (Experiment 3). Results revealed that priming effects were modulated by both event structure and syntactic usage preferences. For ba- and bei-constructions, participants repeated the priming structure more frequently when priming and target events were similar (vs. dissimilar), with further increases for identical events. In contrast, for the dispreferred gei-construction, priming only increased significantly in the identical-event condition, with no difference between similar and dissimilar events. These findings demonstrate that event structure activation influences syntactic choice during grammatical encoding, but this influence is constrained by the strength of syntactic usage preferences. The results highlight the interplay between conceptual (event structure) and linguistic (syntactic usage preference) factors in shaping structural priming. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

PMID:
42574131
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 11 Aug 2026.

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