Actor Identification in Transitive Constructions in Mandarin Chinese

The roles of animacy, plausibility, and memory were investigated to determine how the SVO, ba , and bei constructions were comprehended, where the SVO construction is ‘subject verb object,’ the ba construction is ‘subject ba object verb,’ and the bei construction is ‘subject bei object verb’ in Mandarin Chinese. Animacy contrasts (animate-animate, animate-inanimate, inanimate-animate, and inanimate-inanimate while all sentences were kept plausible) and plausibility contrasts (plausible, implausible, and symmetric while both NPs in the sentences were animate) were manipulated in Experiments 1 and 2. Experiment 3 focused on the omission of an agent from the constructions for the memory effect. All three experiments considered the task of identifying the thematic role, and half of participants identified the actor and half did so for the undergoer. The results revealed a robust effect of better identification of the undergoer than the actor across all three experiments. The SVO and ba constructions were comprehended equally well, and both of them were better than the bei construction during agent-prompting across all three experiments. Animacy effects were observed when the second processed actor did not rank higher in prominence than the first processed undergoer. Plausibility was modulated through the patient role that led to comprehension of the SVO structure being better than that of ba , which was better than that of bei , likely due to their structural complexities. The agentless constructions were generally comprehended better than the agent counterparts. The results were compatible with the actor identification strategy’s account with an understanding of the structure-specific operations during role identification.