Poster D47, Wednesday, August 21, 2019, 5:15 – 7:00 pm, Restaurant Hall
The neuro-cognitive interplay between respectfulness and lexical-semantics in reading Chinese: Evidence from ERPs
Liyan Ji1, YaXu Zhang1;1Peking University
In the area of neurolinguistics, an interesting question is how neuro-cognitive activities underlying the use of pragmatic and lexical-semantic information interplay during language comprehension. Interlocutor identities are a type of pragmatic information and have usually been distinguished from lexical semantics. The present study is to investigate how pragmatic information relevant to interlocutor identity interacts with lexical-semantic information during Chinese sentence comprehension. In Mandarin Chinese, the status of the speaker and addressee can constrain the use of the second-person singular pronoun. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), the present study manipulated both the semantic coherence of a verb phrase (VP) and the respectful coherence of the object noun phrase (NP) in the VP, resulting in 4 types of critical sentences. The object NP was the critical word (CW) for ERP recording. The semantic incoherence was realized by substituting the correct verb of the VP with a semantically anomalous verb, resulting in a violation of verb’s selective restriction on its object at the CW. The respectful incoherence was realized by changing the relative social status of the interlocutors, resulting in an anomaly of respectfulness (being over-respectful) at the CW. In addition, for the double condition, there was a simultaneous incoherence of semantic phrase structure of VP and respectfulness at the CW. Participants read 160 critical Chinese sentences, together with 220 filler sentences. After the end of the ERP recording, they completed both AQ Communication Subscale and a task of sentence acceptability judgement. The ERP results showed that both semantic violation and double violation elicited N400 and P600 responses. However, there was no significant main effect of respectful coherence. We speculate that the ERP responses to respectfulness violation were modulated by individual differences in pragmatic abilities. Thus we spilt participants into two subgroups according to their AQ scores. In the early (150-250 ms) time window, there was a larger P200 to the respectful violation condition compared to the control condition among pragmatically skilled participants (as indexed by a low score on the AQ Communication Subscale, Low AQ-Comm). In contrast, semantic violation elicited a larger P200 among the pragmatically less skilled participants (High AQ-Comm). These results suggest that pragmatically skilled participants initially paid their attention to pragmatic information, whereas pragmatically less skilled participants focused on lexical semantic information. In 300-500 ms and 550-1000 ms time windows, respectful violations elicited a larger N400 and a late negative activity in the high AQ-Comm subgroup. In contrast, respectful violations elicited a more positive activity and a sustained late positive activity in low AQ-Comm subgroup. Crucially, the double violation condition elicited an ERP pattern (N400 + P600) that was similar to that of the semantic violation for both subgroups, suggesting that the respectful violation effects were present only when the VP was semantically coherent. Taken together, these results suggest that semantic violation can preclude readers from engaging in pragmatic inference or pragmatic information processing, regardless of participants’ pragmatic skill. The strategy of resolving the respectful violation and the corresponding brain activities vary according to participants’ pragmatic abilities.
Themes: Meaning: Discourse and Pragmatics, Meaning: Lexical Semantics
Method: Electrophysiology (MEG/EEG/ECOG)