A structural priming study of the information function of the Chinese ba construction

Abstract

Much research on the function of the ba construction in Mandarin Chinese has been conducted. However, there is a controversy about the ba NP regarding whether it expresses a topic denotation, a focus denotation, or neither. To study its information function, the present study has adopted a structural priming paradigm in a self-paced reading experiment to investigate whether Mandarin native speakers’ reaction times (RTs) when reading ba sentences can be influenced after reading a priming sentence of the following three types: topic, focus, and subject-verb-object (SVO). The results revealed that the information conditions had a significant effect on the RT of processing the ba sentence (p < .001), while the RT for the ba NP in the condition of the priming focus sentences was significantly faster than the others. As priming effects occurred in the condition of priming focus sentences, processing the ba NP may be more similar to processing focus than to topic and canonical sentences in language comprehension.