Abstract: This study investigated the processing of the Burmese “V(+AuxV)+taw+V+AuxV” structure by high- and low-level L1-Chinese L2-Burmese learners and native speakers, aiming to examine L1 transfer effects and the Shallow Structure Hypothesis in L2 processing. A self-paced reading experiment was conducted to compare online processing of grammatical (auxiliary verb unrepeated) and ungrammatical (auxiliary verb repeated) conditions. Results showed that: 1) L2 learners reacted faster to the ungrammatical repeated condition than to the grammatical unrepeated condition, while no difference between conditions was observed in native speakers. This suggested that L2 learners were more sensitive to the repetition priming rather than the syntactic error due to the negative transfer from their mother language; However, native speakers noticed both the syntactic error and the repetition priming. 2) Although a significant processing difference was seen between low-level L2 learners and native speakers, high-level L2 learners did not differ significantly from either group. This indicated that high-level L2 learners attempted to reduce the negative transfer from L1, but had not yet achieved native-like processing level. This study provides the first empirical evidence that L2 learners rely on shallow semantic processing in morphosyntactically incongruent Burmese-Chinese structures, supporting the Shallow Structure Hypothesis and enriching L2 acquisition theories in Sino-Tibetan languages.