Advances in the Linguistic Sciences

Download PDF (297.5 KB) PP. 1 - 7 Pub. Date: March 1, 2020

DOI: 10.22606/als.2020.21001

• Ellen ZHANG Yue^*
  Department of English, Faculty of Arts, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

The processing of syntactic and semantic cues while processing structures in learners’ foreign language arouse wide concern and discussion. Since equally robust evidence from priming the syntactically and semantically represented accounts occur across studies, how do bilinguals construct a complicated structure including ellipsis using remains to be confirmed, especially when one single author carried out empirical research in the same language and revealed seemingly different results, yielding misunderstanding and calling for further clarification. Using the verb-phrase ellipsis through structural priming in Mandarin Chines, this article aims to critically discuss existing findings with evidence from Mandarin-English bilinguals.

Verb-phrase ellipsis, structural priming, Chinese-English bilinguals, Mandarin Chinese processing.

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