Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Demonstrations of structural priming in language production have often been attributed to activation of lexical-syntactic representations of the structures that get comprehended. Nevertheless, the current study presented evidence that three forms of ba construction, namely the SbaOVle, SbaOV, SbaOVCle that were made sure to be grammatically certified in Mandarin Chinese through grammaticality judgments were employed to investigate structural priming in production using the picture-description paradigm where each aforementioned form of the ba construction was comprehended by native speakers. The results indicated that only the form of the SbaOVCle led to reliable structural priming effects whereas the remaining two did not. That only the structure of the SbaOVCle induced reliable structural priming effects suggested that activation of lexical-syntactic representations of grammatically certified structures did not guarantee structural priming in language production, but frequencies associated with each of the structures should be taken into consideration for structural priming to occur in production.