Are there segmental and tonal effects on syntactic encoding? Evidence from structural priming in Mandarin

Numerous studies have established that speakers tend to form utterances by reusing previously experienced sentence structures (i.e., structural priming). It was also frequently found the repetition of lexical items enhances priming boost). This facilitation effect occurs not only when there is a full overlap verbs, but one level representation (semantic or phonological representation) overlaps between prime and target. In current study, we further scrutinize on priming. We asked whether independent orthographic overlap, it driven segments, tone, both. five experiments (three lab-based, two web-based experiments), native Mandarin were instructed describe transitive pictures after receiving SVO SOV “ba” sentences. Experiment 1, target verbs had (e.g., 脱[tuo1, take off]-脱[tuo1]), semantic 卸[xie4, remove]-脱[tuo1]), 拖[tuo1, mop]-脱[tuo1]), no 打[da3, beat]-脱[tuo1]) while similarities at other levels carefully avoided. There boost effects, did lab-based their large-scale online replications, in (segmental + tonal, e.g., 拖[tuo1]-脱[tuo1]), syllabic [tuo2, carry]-脱[tuo1]), tonal (称[cheng1, weigh]-脱[tuo1]), overlap. All four showed priming, which boosted The exerted significant whereas found. Together, these results indicate processing feeds back syntactic encoding production, supports an interactive view language production.