Poster A22, Tuesday, August 20, 2019, 10:15 am – 12:00 pm, Restaurant Hall
ERPs profiles for Chinese sentence processing: Relevant factors in noun-noun-verb structures with BA and BEI and effects of adjective placement violations
Max Wolpert1,2, Hui Zhang3, Shari Baum2,4, Karsten Steinhauer2,4;1Integrated Program in Neuroscience, McGill University, 2Centre for Research on Brain, Language and Music, Montreal, 3School of Foreign Languages and Cultures, Nanjing Normal University, 4School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, McGill University
Mandarin Chinese and English both have poor inflectional morphology and canonical subject-verb-object word order, but are otherwise largely dissimilar languages. We took advantage of the cross-linguistic similarities and differences between the languages to conduct two EEG sentence processing experiments with Mandarin monolinguals in China, with the goal of confirming structural targets for a future study on English-Mandarin bilingualism and first language attrition in Canada. In our first experiment, we investigated the effect of sentence structure and animacy on argument structure interpretation in noun-noun-verb (NNV) sentences. While English speakers rely on word order as their primary cue, Mandarin speakers give greater consideration to semantic knowledge to determine who did what to whom (Liu, Bates, & Li, 1992). For instance, the two sentences “the apple the boy eats” and “the boy the apple eats” are both grammatical and have the same meaning in Mandarin regardless of word order, namely that the boy eats the apple. Mandarin also has two coverbs, BA and BEI, which unambiguously assign undergoer and actor status, respectively, to their subsequent noun phrase. Participants’ (n=25) EEG was recorded while reading NNV sentences with or without BA and BEI. After each sentence, participants indicated which noun they interpreted as the actor. Behavioral judgments showed main effects of structure (F=532, p<0.001) and direction of semantic plausibility (F=77, p<0.001) and a significant interaction between structure and semantic direction (F=11, p<0.001), and post-hoc t-tests showed that bare NNV sentences without coverbs were the most affected by semantic direction (all ps<0.001). We analyzed mean amplitude of ERPs at the verb at Cz and Pz electrodes from 300 to 500 ms, and preliminary results showed a greater N400 for the semantic anomalous compared to the semantic congruent condition for BA (t(20)=2.3, p=0.03) and marginally significant for BEI (t(25)=2.0, p=0.06) sentences. This contrasts slightly with Bornkessel-Schlesewsky et al. (2011), who investigated similar structures in spoken Chinese (with 25 native speakers of Mandarin in Germany) and found an N400 effect only for implausible BEI (but not BA) sentences. These differences could be due to our participants being monolingual Mandarin speakers with very limited foreign language exposure or to experimental design differences (e.g., materials, task, or modality). In our second experiment, we investigated Mandarin monolinguals’ (n=18) processing of adjective-noun order violations. Because adjectives generally precede nouns in both English and Mandarin, we predicted that these structures would be resistant to language attrition, but it was unclear if violations in Chinese would elicit the same ERP effects as in English. Mean amplitude at Cz and Pz electrodes showed a greater N400 in 300 to 500 ms time window (t(17)=3.4, p=0.004) and P600 approaching significance in 550 to 900 ms time window (t(17)=1.7, p=0.1) for sentences with adjective-noun order violations, in line with results from English native speakers and Chinese learners of English (Steinhauer 2014). These data not only shed new light on Mandarin monolingual sentence processing, but also show promising targets for current efforts to study cross-linguistic influences in bilingual sentence processing and first language attrition.
Themes: Syntax, Multilingualism
Method: Electrophysiology (MEG/EEG/ECOG)