Dong-Bo Hsu

National Taiwan Normal University | NTNU · Department of Chinese as a Second Language

Two studies were undertaken to investigate structural priming in Mandarin-speaking three-, four- and, six-year-old children using a Mandarin-specific alternation between an SVO construction and a ba-construction (SbaOV). Structural priming occurred either as a single prime or cumulatively when a block of multiple primes with the same structure is a...

Two studies are presented that investigate the effect of linguistic cues on Mandarin speakers’ comprehension of transitive constructions. Study 1 investigated Mandarin-speaking 2- to 4-year-olds’ and adults’ comprehension of the SVO (Subject-verb-object) construction, ba-construction (SbaOV), and subjectless ba-construction ((S)baOV) with novel ver...

抽象 本文檢視漢語母語者、西班牙語母語者漢語初級及中高級學習者在理解具有不同生命性對比的名詞組之下的漢語主動賓句以及主題句時所採用的模式。結果發現在主動賓句方面，三組均將第一個名詞組當成施事、第二個名詞組當成受事（即 NVN 捷思法），而名詞生命性的對比影響不大。至於主題句的理解，漢語母語人士及中高級的學習者隨機猜測其中一個名詞組作為施事，而初級的學習者則多運用 NVN 捷思法處理之。這三組漢語使用者的理解模式，符應了語法優先假說：運用語法結構進行語句理解，雖然名詞組生命性的對比影響了主題句的理解，但其影響力未大過語法結構。

Second language learners’ (hereafter L2ers) first language backgrounds, exposure to L2 input, and cross-linguistically common patterns often play a vital role in their construction of grammatical representations in L2 acquisition. The current study investigates how these factors exert an impact on native speakers from typologically different Mandar...

Three experiments on structural priming in Mandarin-speaking 5-year-olds were conducted to test the priming as implicit learning hypothesis. It describes a learning mechanism that acts on a shared abstract syntactic representation in response to linguistic input using an equi-biased Mandarin SVO-ba alternation. The first two experiments reported th...

This study attempts to investigate the development of abstraction of syntax among adult Mandarin second language learners (hereafter L2ers) at different levels of proficiency with the Mandarin SVO-ba alternation using structural priming. The Mandarin ba-construction does not exist in L2ers' first language (L1). Strong L1 positive and negative trans...

ABSTRACT Two studies investigated syntactic productivity in three-year-old Mandarin speakers' use of verbs in the SVO and SbaOV constructions. In Study 1, children were taught novel verbs in one construction and assessed for their production in the other construction. Children produced verbs taught in the ba constructions in SVO utterances, but sho...

How to represent a syllable is by no means a settled question in generative grammar. This paper employs the diagnostic tool Replace (X) to examine the sub-syllabic constituency in Old Chinese (OC) by virtue of two types of directional reduplication data: progressive and retrogressive reduplication. This paper finds that the OC syllable is comprised...

The phenomenon of structural persistence has been intensively investigated in speakers of English and in speakers of other Germanic languages. However, few studies have been reported on Chinese, especially on preschooler population. In addition, the SVO-ba alternation and dative alternation have not been discussed in terms of this perspective. The...