Grammatical Encoding In Sentence Production

Two major sentence production models,namely two-stage and one-stage models,have not reached consensus on grammatical encoding.Existing work has mainly focused on languages with rich morphology,including English,German and Dutch,with few work on isolating languages such as Chinese.To date,no work has examined Zhuang,an isolating language.In Zhuang,dative construction can be expressed in double object(DO)and shifted double object(SDO)alternations,thus providing a new perspective to further test the two models.Using two sentence-production experiments,this study is the first attempt to investigate the mechanisms underlying grammatical encoding in Zhuang.Experiment 1 uses a picture-elicitation task to examine the production rate or the frequency of use between the DO and SDO alternations in Zhuang.Experiment 2adopts structural priming paradigm to investigate the priming effects of DO and SDO structures.Across the two experiments,the pictures and verbs of the dative events are identical.Target stimuli were normed by a grammaticality-judgment rating test on five-point scale.Experiment 1 showed no difference between DO and SDO utterances produced by participants of Zhuang.Experiment 2 showed significant priming effects of syntactic structure: participants uttered significantly more DO sentences when they were primed by the DO structure than by the SDO structure or by the control baseline.Similarly,participants uttered significantly more SDO sentences when they were primed by the SDO structure than by the DO structure or by the control baseline.These results suggest that both DO and SDO structures can induce within-structure priming effects,but they cannot prime each other.Taken together,the results support the one-stage model.