The period between the ages of 4 and 6 is crucial for young children to develop their capacity for spoken sentence production. The interplay between syntactic and lexical information in children's sentence production has garnered attention in the field of language acquisition. Recently, experts in Indo-European languages have begun to utilize the priming paradigm to address this question; however, theoretical conflicts remain. Unlike Indo-European languages, Mandarin, as an isolating language, relies on function words and word order instead of morphological changes to express grammar. Some researchers have even proposed that Chinese syntax is a language usage and there is no syntactic structure separate from semantics. Consequently, we intend to evaluate pre-existing theories by scrutinizing the syntactic representation in four-to-six-year-old Mandarin-speaking children. To examine the effects of syntactic structure and verb repetition on the syntactic representation of Chinese in young children, we employed a syntactic priming paradigm with sentence repetition and image description tasks using the particular transitive structures of Chinese (SVO, SbaOV, and SbeiOV) as the corpus. A total of 77 preschool children with an average age of 4.4 years were enrolled in the experiment. The study involved the manipulation of Prime types (SVO, SbaOV, SbeiOV, and baseline) and Verb types (no overlap versus overlap). The dependent variable was the ratio of syntactic choices. The results of the study showed that abstract priming effects are induced by the three syntactic structures, irrespective of whether the verb overlaps or not. Especially, when young children begin a specific sentence pattern, such as an SbaOV structure, they tend to formulate an SbaOV structure in the target sentence rather than an SVO or SbeiOV structure. This implies that the development of syntactic knowledge does not rely on lexical information. Additionally, it is worth mentioning that despite the absence of an increase in priming strength in SbaOV or SbeiOV structures with verb overlap, the probability of older children (5-6 years old) opting for an SOV structure during priming is augmented. This finding implies that the emergence of verb boost effects is influenced by the age of children and their syntactic structural preferences. Moreover, the priming effect of non-preferential structures is more powerful than that of preferential structures regardless of whether the verb overlaps, resulting in a reverse preferential effect. To summarize, the acquisition of syntax in Chinese children aligns with the Implicit Learning Theory, whereby they exhibit abstract priming effects stemming from their anticipation of error estimates. Conversely, the lexical boost effect is determined by their working memory. Simultaneously, this research challenges both the RA-Early and RA-Later syntactic models, which rely on the Residual Activation Theory. We believe that children's syntactic representations may not emerge exclusively from the syntactic structures and node links between verbs. In essence, it is not feasible to induce both abstract priming and lexical reinforcement effects in young children during the early stages of cognitive development. Furthermore, establishing lexical dependency effects before generating abstract representations is not a prerequisite.
