The facilitation of constructional meaning in the processing of Mandarin innovative Bei construction

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Science

Background:

• Mandarin innovative Bei constructions (Bei + X) differ from traditional ones by activating an intrinsic negative constructional meaning.
• Understanding the cognitive mechanisms behind processing these emergent meanings is crucial for linguistic theory.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if processing Mandarin innovative Bei constructions is facilitated by accessing emergent negative associations.
• To provide psychological evidence for construction-based processing of these innovative linguistic forms.

Main Methods:

• A self-paced reading experiment employing a priming paradigm.
• Participants were primed with construction-related, component-related, or unrelated phrases before reading sentences with innovative Bei constructions.

Main Results:

• Lexical primes conveying the negative constructional meaning of innovative Bei constructions significantly reduced reading time.
• This effect was observed in comparison to priming with component-related or unrelated phrases.

Conclusions:

• Processing of Mandarin innovative Bei constructions is facilitated by priming their inherent constructional meaning.
• Findings support a construction-based account for the psycholinguistic processing of these Mandarin grammatical structures.