The influence of greater syntactic flexibility on language production in Mandarin

This paper reports an on-line production study on how different levels of syntactic flexibility influence the production of locative resultative constructions in Mandarin Chinese. Though previous studies show that having two available syntactic structures (flexible condition) facilitates language production and results in less errors and shorter reaction time than having only one possible syntactic structure (non-flexible condition), it is still not clear whether greater syntactic flexibility (i.e. having three or four structure choices) have the same effects. Results of this study show main effects in error rates, correct response rates and production latencies for the contrast between syntactic flexibility and non-flexibility. However, there is no significance between higher levels of syntactic flexibility, suggesting the contrast between having three structure choices vs. having four structure choices does not have the same effects with lower levels of syntactic flexibility.