Are there segmental and tonal effects on syntactic encoding? Evidence from structural priming in Mandarin

•The Mandarin Ba-SVO transitive alternation shows structural priming.•There is a lexical, but not a semantic, boost of such priming.•The phonological boost of such priming does not depend on orthographic overlap.•Syllabic overlap promotes structural priming while tonal overlap is not.•Phonological (and lexical) overlap facilitates word order encoding.