The Role Of Event Structure In Language Production:A Structural Priming Study In Chinese Motion Event Description

Language production consists of three stages: 1) at the stage of Message Planning, speakers choose the conceptual information that they want to include in their utterances; 2) at the stage of Linguistic Formulation, they distribute the conceptual information to linguistic locations and then form them into syntactic structure; 3) at the stage of Articulation, speakers retrieve phonological information and generate a sequence of speech. Previous studies find that syntactic structures affect speakers' message planning and linguistic formulation; while recently, some researchers prove that abstract event structure also has effects on speakers' choice of conceptual information and later on speakers' selection of syntactic structure. All the previous studies are carried out on the base of motion event descriptions from satellite-framed languages(e.g. English) and verb-framed languages(e.g. Greek). However, Chinese belongs to a third type of languages�equipollently-framed languages. Whether and how abstract event structure influences Chinese speakers' choice of conceptual information and linguistic formulation during the process of language production is still unknown.Two research questions are raised: 1) Does the activation of abstract event structure influence Chinese speakers' choice conceptual information and order of event components? If so, how? 2) Does the activation of abstract event structure have any implication for Chinese speakers' selection of the linguistic locations of conceptual information and syntactic structure? If so, how?Two structural priming experiments are then designed. Participants give their motion event descriptions in Chinese based on target events which are motion events displayed in cartoons. And three types of prime sentences are presented before the cartoons: Type 1, which includes both overlap of abstract event structure and the verb with target events; Type 2, which includes only the overlap of abstract event structure; Type 3, which includes no conceptual overlap with the targets at all.Two experiments showed the following findings: 1) under both Type 1 and Type 2, Chinese speakers included more paths compared to the control condition; 2) under both Type 1 and Type 2, Chinese speakers chose to distribute more path in the main verb, while only under Type 1, did Chinese speakers distribute more manner to subject; 3) only under Type 1, did Chinese speakers produce more syntactic structure([AP_N ]_V_NP) as that in the prime sentences; 4) when the path is put before the manner in experiment two's prime sentence, Chinese speakers under no conditions are influenced by the activation of abstract event structure to distribute path to the main verb, manner to the post-verbal position or produce the particular syntactic structure(NP_V_NP_PP) as that in the prime sentence.These findings suggest that Chinese speakers are sensitive to the abstract event structure encoded in the prime sentences, and it influences Chinese speakers' message planning and linguistic formulation in a top-down way. Moreover, Chinese specific grammatical encoding bias of motion events�manner verb is often put before path verb, also plays a role in Chinese speaker' language planning. Finally, motion event descriptions given under the two experiments provide on-line evidence that Chinese belongs to the third type�equipollently-framed languages.