Abstract
Event-related potential components are sensitive to the processes underlying how questions are understood. We use so-called “covert” wh-questions in Mandarin to probe how such components generalize across different kinds of constructions. This study shows that covert Mandarin wh-questions do not elicit anterior negativities associated with memory maintenance, even when such a dependency is unambiguously cued. N = 37 native speakers of Mandarin Chinese read Chinese questions and declarative sentences word-by-word during EEG recording. In contrast to prior studies, no sustained anterior negativity (SAN) was observed between the cue word, such as the question-embedding verb “wonder,” and the in-situ wh-filler. SANs have been linked with working memory maintenance, suggesting that grammatical features may not impose the same maintenance demands as the content words used in prior work.
Highlights
A central puzzle in linguistics is how language users understand the relationship between words that appear far apart from each other in sentences
The current study focuses on event-related potentials (ERP) components that have been connected with the maintenance of a filler element in working memory; we provide novel data from the processing of Mandarin wh-questions to shed light on the functional interpretation of these components
The present study examines the processing of Mandarin wh-questions, which has the wh-feature to trigger the prediction of the in-situ wh-word encountered later
Summary
A central puzzle in linguistics is how language users understand the relationship between words that appear far apart from each other in sentences. These are called long-distance, or non-local, dependencies. Previous studies have investigated the processing of different kinds of long-distance dependencies, including topicalization (1), relativization (2), and wh-questions (3) (e.g., Kluender and Kutas, 1993; Gibson et al, 2005; Phillips et al, 2005). The italicized words in (1)–(3) are socalled “fillers,” which appear in a part of the sentence other than where they are interpreted. The interpretation site, or “gap,” is indicated with underlining. This paper uses wh-dependencies, of the sort shown in (3), to probe the processing mechanisms that underlie long-distance dependencies
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