The Primacy of Roles over Syntactic Structures: Mental Representation of Chinese Verbs in Argument Realization

Abstract

Within the framework of argument realization theory, Semantic Role Lists, Participant Roles, and Predicate–Argument Structures represent competing models of verb semantics, each yielding distinct predictions regarding mental representation and processing complexity. This study formalizes these perspectives into two competing accounts: the Role-Quantity Hypothesis (H1), which posits that processing load is driven by the number of event participants, and the Structure-Quantity Hypothesis (H2), which attributes complexity to the multiplicity of syntactic templates. To evaluate these hypotheses, a lexical decision task was conducted on Chinese verbs. The results revealed a significant main effect of role quantity: two-role verbs elicited longer reaction times and lower accuracy than one-role verbs. Conversely, no significant differences were found between one-structure and two-structure verbs. These findings provide robust empirical support for H1, indicating that role-based representations possess greater psychological reality in the Chinese mental lexicon. We argue that for an isolating language like Chinese, verb processing is primarily event-driven, where role information serves as a predictive heuristic during early lexical access. This study offers new insights into the role-based nature of Chinese verb representation, its psychological reality in real-time processing, and the value of integrating argument realization theory with experimental psycholinguistics.