Corpus linguistic research has had an iconoclastic effect on traditional linguistic theories and descriptions.Intuitions have been found to be untrustworthy and the focus on what is characteristically done by speakers rather than on what might be done has redirected linguistic attention from issues of competence to one of fluency.However, the energy that has fuelled the iconoclasm has not been matched by equivalent energy for rebuilding theories.Rather, corpus linguistics has tended to attach itself to pre-existing theoretical perspectives that appeared capable of accommodating corpus linguistic findings, such as cognitive linguistics and connectionism.One theory that has been developed in response to the insights derived from corpus linguistics, and in particular the work of John Sinclair, is that of Lexical Priming.Lexical Priming is unusual as a (corpus-driven) theory in that it builds upon long-standing and widely accepted psycholinguistic research into the ways word recognition may be accelerated or retarded by previous exposure to other words.The psycholinguistic experimentation (well described in Pace-Sigge, forthcoming) is used to account for the phenomena of collocation, colligation and semantic preference (rechristened semantic association in the theory) as described in Sinclairs work.However, because the theory builds upon general psycholinguistic claims about the way language is stored and accessed, its implications extend beyond these phenomena and it generates hypotheses that have not been previous explored in a systematic fashion by corpus linguists.The investigation of one of these hypotheses will be reported on.Again, because the psycholinguistic claims are not culture-or language-specific, the theory generates hypotheses about all languages, not only indo-European ones.The paper will present preliminary observations on the applicability of Lexical Priming theory to Chinese.