Abstract
There is a long-standing debate concerning whether Mandarin topic constructions are movement-derived and form a filler-gap dependency like the English-type topicalization. This ERP study explores this issue by testing whether island constraints, a diagnostic for movement, are actively observed during online processing of the Mandarin “gap-type” topic construction, an understudied area in Mandarin sentence processing research. Following the paradigm of Traxler and Pickering's 1996 study, we manipulated islandhood (relative clause island conditions vs. no island conditions) and plausibility, or whether the topic is a plausible object of the potential subcategorizing verb based on animacy fit (i.e., “greet a teacher” vs. “greet a file”) in a 2 × 2 design. We predict that any plausibility effect obtained for the non-island conditions would disappear for the island conditions if the parser observes the island constraint and avoids positing gaps inside an island. we observed a P600-previously found for animacy violations-for the non-island conditions but not for the island conditions. Additionally, we found a positive-going component occurring from 588 to 792 ms at the fronto-central site for the island condition at the potential gap site. While this novel ERP's interpretation is yet to be determined, it is unlikely to indicate any plausibility effect. Our findings suggest that the parser is sensitive to island constraints in online processing of the Mandarin “gap-type” topic structure, and lend support to the movement analysis for Mandarin topicalization.
Highlights
Mandarin Chinese, like many East Asian languages, is considered a “topic prominent” language (e.g., Li and Thompson, 1981)
Mean voltage data was extracted from two spatial regions of interest (ROI) defined by the selected temporospatial factor from the principal components analysis (TF01SF1-Island Principal Components Analysis (PCA); TF01SF1-Non-island PCA) over a time window defined with a 0.6 beta weight criterion
Mean voltage data was extracted from a frontal ROI over a 588–792 ms time window, both of which were defined by the Island condition PCA (TF01SF1)
Summary
Mandarin Chinese, like many East Asian languages, is considered a “topic prominent” language (e.g., Li and Thompson, 1981). English-like topicalization, which is allowed in many languages, is widely accepted to involve a movement-derived filler-gap dependency between the fronted element (the topic or the “filler”) and its originating position (after the subcategorizing verb or the “gap”) (e.g., Chomsky, 1986; Felser et al, 2003) Both online processing and offline judgment evidence consistently show that the formation of such a dependency is sensitive to island constraints, a signature feature of syntactic movement (e.g., Chomsky, 1986; Traxler and Pickering, 1996). We seek to test whether a type of island constraint, namely the complex noun phrase constraint, is actively observed in the online processing of a common type of Chinese topic structure (the gap-type topic-comment, see below for more details) This allows us to shed light on whether the Mandarin topic structure forms the same movement-derived filler-gap dependency as English topicalization. We discuss existing ERP evidence on the processing of Chinese topic structures and other filler-gap dependencies, before introducing the design and predictions of the current experiment
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