It has been well established that syntactic representation is independent of semantic representation in Indo-European languages, but it is unclear whether this is the case in Chinese. The present functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study adopted a syntactic priming paradigm to investigate the neural basis of Chinese syntactic representation. A passive sentence was preceded by either a passive or an active sentence without repeating a verb or a pattern of agent-patient animacy, thus constructing primed and unprimed sentence pairs based on sentence structure. The fMRI data were collected from 22 native Chinese speakers while they were reading the sentences. Priming-related activation suppression was found in the left temporal pole, left inferior frontal gyrus and left precentral gyrus. The results are the strongest neuroimaging evidence to date that syntactic representation is independent of semantic representation in Chinese, in line with Indo-European languages.

在印欧语言中，句法表示独立于语义表示，这一点已经得到公认，但尚不清楚中文是否如此。目前的功能磁共振成像 (fMRI) 研究采用句法启动范式来研究汉语句法表征的神经基础。被动句前面是被动句或主动句，不重复动词或代理 - 患者生气的模式，从而根据句子结构构建启动和未启动的句子对。fMRI 数据是从 22 名以中文为母语的人在阅读句子时收集的。在左侧颞极、左侧额下回和左侧中央前回发现启动相关的激活抑制。