BA and object state changes: Unspecific morphosyntactic cues shape Mandarin discourse comprehension

Understanding object state changes as consequences of transitive events is an important part of event cognition. How do people do this? Previous research shows that comprehenders use verb-based morphosyntactic cues that have specific meanings to generate expectations about the state of the upcoming objects in discourse processing. Can they also do so using non–verb-based and unspecific morphosyntactic cues, such as the preposition “BA” in the Mandarin “BA” structure? In four forced-choice image selection experiments, we found a robust “BA” effect in shaping Mandarin comprehenders’ discourse expectations about object state changes. Moreover, this effect was amplified by the presence of classifiers and modulated by contexts with varying levels of constraint on the upcoming objects. These findings provide important insights into discourse expectations based on a previously unstudied type of unspecific morphosyntactic cue (i.e., a preposition) and shed new light on language-mediated visual attention and event segmentation in discourse processing.