The independence of syntactic processing in Mandarin: Evidence from structural priming

• Processing models of Mandarin dispute whether syntax is represented independently.
• Five experiments investigated structural priming of dative structures in Mandarin.
• Priming occurred even when animacy features were not repeated between prime and target.
• Syntactic processing in Mandarin involves independent syntactic representations.

Although it is generally accepted that syntactic information is processed independently of semantic information in languages such as English, there is less agreement about whether the same is true in languages such as Mandarin that have fewer reliable cues to syntactic structure. We report five experiments that used a structural priming paradigm to investigate the independence of syntactic processing in Mandarin. In a recognition memory task, Mandarin native speakers described ditransitive events after repeating prime sentences with a double object (DO) or prepositional object (PO) structure. Participants tended to repeat syntactic structure across prime and target sentences. Critically, this tendency occurred whether or not semantic features (animacy of the recipient) were also repeated across sentences, both when the verb was repeated and when it was not. We conclude that Mandarin speakers compute independent syntactic representations during language processing.