Theories of language processing generally assume that speakers construct independent representations for syntactic and semantic information, based largely on evidence from English and related languages. But it is not clear whether the assumption of autonomous syntactic representations extends to other languages with different typological characteristics. We therefore conducted two structural priming studies investigating production of dative sentences in Mandarin, a language whose interpretation appears to be more reliant on non-relational (intrinsic) semantics (e.g., animacy features). We examined whether participants' tendency to repeat syntax was affected by whether the theme and recipient arguments matched or mismatched in animacy across prime and target. Participants repeated syntax to the same extent irrespective of whether prime and target arguments had matched or mismatched animacy. These findings provide evidence that the separation of syntactic and semantic representations occurs in Mandarin and therefore may occur across languages.

Previous studies have suggested that multilingual speakers do not represent their languages entirely separately but instead share some representations across languages. To determine whether sharing is affected by language similarity, we investigated whether participants' tendency to repeat syntax across languages was affected by language similarity. In three cross-linguistic structural priming experiments, trilingual Mandarin-Cantonese-English participants heard a sentence in Cantonese or English (which they matched to a picture) and then described a dative event in Mandarin. When prime and target sentences involved different actions (Experiment 1), structural priming was unaffected by language similarity. But when prime and target involved the same action (Experiments 2 and 3), priming was stronger between related languages (i.e., Cantonese to Mandarin) than unrelated languages (i.e., English to Mandarin). Similar languages are not more integrated than dissimilar languages overall, but the representations that connect lexical and syntactic information are more closely integrated.

Structural priming studies in production have demonstrated stronger priming effects for unexpected sentence structures (inverse preference effect). This is consistent with error-based implicit learning accounts that assume learning depends on prediction error. Such prediction error can be verb-specific, leading to strong priming when a verb that is for instance biased toward the prepositional object (PO) structure occurs with an unexpected double object (DO) structure. However, it is unclear whether this mechanism also holds for language comprehension, especially for languages like Mandarin Chinese, which arguably depends strongly on semantics to predict syntax in comprehension. Experiment 1 was a norming study (N = 367) that measured the biases (DO vs. PO) of 48 Mandarin Chinese dative verbs. Experiment 2 (N = 72) crossed verb bias (DO-bias or PO-bias) and structure (DO or PO) of prime sentences in a visual-world paradigm, to examine whether Mandarin comprehenders show an inverse preference effect. The priming effect is expressed as the proportion of looks to the predicted referent (i.e., the recipient after a DO-prime, the theme after a PO-prime), for two critical time windows during target sentence processing: the verb and the first syllable of the first postverbal noun (which was identical in theme and recipient). There was priming in both time windows, even though the verb differed between prime and target. Importantly, there was an inverse preference effect (i.e., stronger priming after a DO prime with a PO-biased verb than with a DO-biased verb) in the second time window. These results provide evidence for an error-based structure prediction system in comprehension.

Arai et al. (2007) showed that structural priming in the comprehension of English dative sentences only occurred when the verb was repeated between prime and target, suggesting a lexically-dependent mechanism of structure prediction. However, a recent study in Mandarin comprehension found abstract (verb-independent) structural priming and such priming was stronger when the structure was unexpected (e.g., when a verb biased toward the double object [DO] structure is followed by an unexpected prepositional object [PO] structure; Chen et al., 2022). The latter finding of inverse preference priming is consistent with error-based implicit learning accounts, which suggest structural priming is based on learning from prediction errors (Chang et al., 2006). Here we tested the mechanism of structure prediction (lexically-dependent vs. abstract) in four visual-world comprehension experiments in Dutch. Dutch is a Germanic language like English; it is biased toward the PO structure like Mandarin. We not only found structural priming when the verb was repeated, but also when the verb was different: During target sentence processing, comprehenders looked more often at the recipient (predicting a DO structure) than at the theme (predicting a PO structure) after a DO prime and vice versa after a PO prime. Importantly, abstract structural priming only occurred when the target structure was relatively unpredictable. We interpret the inconsistent findings across languages in terms of an effortful process of structure prediction in comprehension (Pickering & Gambi, 2018): it occurs when it is needed to disambiguate the postverbal arguments, but not when it is optional.

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