This study investigates how visual context influences second language (L2) long-term structural priming for the Chinese "ba" construction. The experiment consisted of a baseline phase, an exposure phase, an immediate posttest, and a delayed posttest. L2 Chinese learners (N = 120) were assigned to 1 of 4 groups for the exposure…

We report 2 self-paced reading experiments investigating the longevity of structural priming effects in comprehending reduced relative clauses among adult Chinese-speaking learners of English. Experiment 1 showed that structural priming occurred both when prime and target sentences were immediately adjacent and when they were separated by 1 or 2…

Two eye-tracking experiments were conducted using written Chinese sentences that contained a multi-word ambiguous region. The goal was to determine whether readers maintained multiple interpretations throughout the ambiguous region or selected a single interpretation at the point of ambiguity. Within the ambiguous region, we manipulated the…

Two event-related brain potential experiments were conducted to investigate whether there is a functional primacy of syntactic structure building over semantic processes during Chinese sentence reading. In both experiments, we found that semantic interpretation proceeded despite the impossibility of a well-formed syntactic analysis. In Experiment…

Prepositional phrase attachment was investigated in temporarily ambiguous sentences. Both attachment site (noun phrase or verb phrase) and argument status (argument or adjunct) were manipulated to test the hypothesis that arguments are processed differently than adjuncts. Contrary to this hypothesis, some previous research suggested that arguments…

We conducted two word-by-word reading experiments to investigate the timing of implausibility detection for recipient and instrument prepositional phrases (PPs). These PPs differ in thematic role, relative frequency, and possibly in argument status. The results showed a difference in the timing of garden path effects such that the detection of…