0000000000133850
AUTHOR
Luming Wang
Exploring the nature of the ‘subject’-preference: Evidence from the online comprehension of simple sentences in Mandarin Chinese
In two visual ERP studies, we investigated whether Mandarin Chinese shows a subject-preference in spite of the controversial status of grammatical relations in this language. We compared ERP responses at the position of the verb and the second NP in object-verb-subject (OVS) and subject-verb-object (SVO) structures. While SVO is the basic word order in Chinese and OV with subject-drop is possible, OVS is strongly dispreferred. At the position of the verb, which disambiguated towards an object or a subject reading of NP1, Experiment 1 revealed an N400 for both subject-initial control conditions in comparison with the critical object-initial condition. Experiment 2 showed that this result was…
Think globally: Cross-linguistic variation in electrophysiological activity during sentence comprehension
This paper demonstrates systematic cross-linguistic differences in the electrophysiological correlates of conflicts between form and meaning (“semantic reversal anomalies”). These engender P600 effects in English and Dutch (e.g. Kolk et al., 2003 ; Kuperberg et al., 2003), but a biphasic N400 – late positivity pattern in German (Schlesewsky and Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, 2009), and monophasic N400 effects in Turkish (Experiment 1) and Mandarin Chinese (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 revealed that, in Icelandic, semantic reversal anomalies show the English pattern with verbs requiring a position-based identification of argument roles, but the German pattern with verbs requiring a case-based identi…
New is not always costly: evidence from online processing of topic and contrast in Japanese.
Two visual ERP experiments were conducted to investigate topic and contrast assigned by various cues such as discourse context, sentential position and marker during referential processing in Japanese. Experiment 1 showed that there was no N400-difference for new vs. given noun phrases (NPs) when the new NP was expected (contrastively focused) based on its preceding context and sentential position. Experiment 2 further revealed that the N400 for new NPs can be modulated by the NP’s contrastive meaning (exhausitivity) induced from the marker. Both experiments also showed that new NPs engendered an increased Late Positivity. The reduced N400 for new vs. given supports an expectation-based lin…
The role of animacy in online argument interpretation in Mandarin Chinese
The present event-related brain potential (ERPs) study demonstrates that online argument interpretation in verb-final structures in Mandarin Chinese is modulated by two factors: a preference for Undergoer-before-Actor orders and a preference for animate Actor arguments. Participants listened to sentences with NP(animate)-NP(inanimate)-verb or NP(inanimate)-NP(animate)-verb orders embedded in minimal contexts. Sentences were disambiguated towards either an Actor-initial or an Undergoer-initial order by the clause-final verb. Between 450 and 700 ms post verb onset, we observed an anterior negativity for sentences violating both preferences (inanimate-Actor-initial structures) vs. sentences fu…