Event Structure Influences Language Production: A Structural Priming Study From Chinese Event Similarity

During language production,the message that a speaker wants to express goes through three complicated stages before it turns out to be as an utterance.At the stage of Message Planning,the content of the utterance is decided.Here speakers select the conceptual level information that they want to include in the utterance.At the stage of Linguistic Formulation,the structure of the utterance is determined.Here the abstract conceptual information is then translated into linguistic forms.At the stage of Articulation,after the retrieval of phonological information,final speech plan is generated.Very little research has targeted the Message Planning stage of language production.What more,studies are largely based on English and closely related languages and thus lead to the lack of cross-linguistic data.This study was therefore conducted to answer the following question: is event structure activated at the stage of Message Planning in Chinese native speakers’ language production? If the answer is yes,how does the activated event structure map into syntactic structure?Three experiments were conducted in the present study.Each had 30 university students participated for payment,all of them are native Chinese speakers.Under the sentence-retelling picture-description structural priming paradigm,the subjects were required to describe target pictures showing two-entities(agent and patient)events with general active sentences and Ba sentences(Experiment 1)or Bei sentences(Experiment 2)or Gei sentences(Experiment 3)in Chinese after repeating primes.The similarity of event structure was manipulated by presenting participants with sentences containing same,similar or dissimilar verbs.The results of the experiments were as follows: 1)For both actives(including both ordinary actives and Ba-constructions)and Bei-constructions under passives,there is a structural priming effect;2)For both actives(including both ordinary actives and Ba-constructions)and Bei-constructions under passives,speakers repeated the primed structures more often across same and conceptual similar event than dissimilar conditions.To be more specific,the priming effect of same event type is stronger than similar event type,and similar event type is stronger than dissimilar event type;3)For Gei-constructions under the passives,the priming effect of event similarity is not significant.These findings suggest that on the one hand,Chinese speakers are sensitive to abstract event structure encoded in the prime sentences,for event similarity influences Chinese speakers’ choice of linguistic structure at the second stage of language production.Experiment two showed,for the first time,structural priming in Bei sentences but only a weak magnitude.The overall of first two findings suggest the activation of event structure facilitates the generation of production framework both at the Message Planning stage and the Linguistic Formulation stage.On the other hand,experiment three showed that the influence of abstract event structure on language production is determined,to some extent,by the specific linguistic constructions,for Gei sentences fail to show priming effect.The result indicates the participation of lexical items in linguistic constructions.