Structural priming in Mandarin Chinese and its contribution to syntactic productivity among young children.

摘要

This dissertation aims to investigate the realizations of linguistic knowledge across three domains, i.e., language acquisition, language comprehension, and language production, using the occurrence of structural priming in the Mandarin Chinese SVO/ba alternation and dative alternation. On the one hand, this dissertation attempts to further our understanding of the nature of structural priming by addressing the following goals: (1) to advance the existing accounts for the occurrence of structural priming in comprehension and production; (2) to test the continuity hypothesis of structural priming (Chang, Dell, & Bock, 2006), and the priming as learning hypothesis; (3) to examine the hypothesis that structural priming and syntactic productivity among young children are two Bides of the same coin, and to study their relationship with abstract syntactic representation in young children; and (4) to investigate the efficacy of the constraining factors of input statistics and sensitivity to aspectual semantics on young children's syntactic productivity. On the other hand, this dissertation takes advantage of the sensitivity of structural priming to grammatical encoding to investigate the issues of Chinese present-day canonical word order and part of speech which are associated with the ba-construction.;First, an account of structural priming extended from Ferreira and Bock's (2006) two-locus account is proposed, on which the cognitive bases of procedural memory and declarative memory underlie structural priming in both comprehension and production. The results of three priming experiments with adult Chinese speakers, in monologue setting, indicate that the cognitive basis of procedural memory is activated more readily in production than in comprehension. It is proposed that while repeating a prime is sufficient for activating procedural memory in production, additional measures, such as use of dialogue, are necessary to activate procedural memory in comprehension.;Second, the extended two-locus account is applied to the occurrence of structural priming in comprehension and production in children. The results of three priming experiments with Chinese-speaking 5-year-olds indicate that when the cognitive basis of procedural memory is activated in dialogue, structural priming occurs in comprehension as well as production. It is furthermore shown that structural priming in comprehension-to-production exhibits learning properties, by persisting over multiple trials. The findings that structural priming occurs in children as well as adults support the continuity hypothesis of structural priming (Chang et al. 2006).;Third, the priming experiments provide psycholinguistic evidence that SVO word order, as opposed to the SOV word order manifested by the ba-construction, is the predominant word order in present-day Chinese, and that ba is encoded as a category between a verb and a preposition. These findings are consistent with the light verb analysis of ba (Huang, A. Li, & Y. Li, 2009).;Fourth, the results of three syntactic productivity experiments with Chinese-speaking 3-year-olds indicate that syntactic productivity is facilitated by structural priming. The occurrence of syntactic productivity among 3-year-olds furthermore provides evidence supporting the early abstraction hypothesis (Fisher 2002a), according to which children below the age of 4 are able to represent abstract syntactic knowledge. Additionally, the results provide suggestive evidence that Chinese-speaking 3-year-olds are able to take advantage of aspectual semantics to constrain syntactic productivity and avoid overgeneralization errors.;Overall, it is argued that structural priming continues to be a promising method for investigating linguistic knowledge and linguistic representation across languages. This dissertation ends with suggestions for further research on structural priming among first and second language speakers in comprehension and production.