Abstract
A number of studies have explored the time course of Chinese semantic and syntactic processing. However, whether syntactic processing occurs earlier than semantics during Chinese sentence reading is still under debate. To further explore this issue, an event-related potentials (ERPs) experiment was conducted on 21 native Chinese speakers who read individually-presented Chinese simple sentences (NP1+VP+NP2) word-by-word for comprehension and made semantic plausibility judgments. The transitivity of the verbs was manipulated to form three types of stimuli: congruent sentences (CON), sentences with a semantically violated NP2 following a transitive verb (semantic violation, SEM), and sentences with a semantically violated NP2 following an intransitive verb (combined semantic and syntactic violation, SEM+SYN). The ERPs evoked from the target NP2 were analyzed by using the Residue Iteration Decomposition (RIDE) method to reconstruct the ERP waveform blurred by trial-to-trial variability, as well as by using the conventional ERP method based on stimulus-locked averaging. The conventional ERP analysis showed that, compared with the critical words in CON, those in SEM and SEM+SYN elicited an N400–P600 biphasic pattern. The N400 effects in both violation conditions were of similar size and distribution, but the P600 in SEM+SYN was bigger than that in SEM. Compared with the conventional ERP analysis, RIDE analysis revealed a larger N400 effect and an earlier P600 effect (in the time window of 500–800 ms instead of 570–810ms). Overall, the combination of conventional ERP analysis and the RIDE method for compensating for trial-to-trial variability confirmed the non-significant difference between SEM and SEM+SYN in the earlier N400 time window. Converging with previous findings on other Chinese structures, the current study provides further precise evidence that syntactic processing in Chinese does not occur earlier than semantic processing.
Highlights
Language comprehension involves single word recognition and semantic integration of words according to certain syntactic rules
The results showed a similar negative-going component peaking at around 400 ms (N400) for semantic violation (SEM) and SEM+SYN, suggesting that introducing the SYN did not interrupt semantic processing
Pair-wise comparisons indicated that whereas SEM and SEM+SYN were rated as more difficult to continue than CON, the first two had similar mean scores, suggesting that the degree of severity of violation at the critical words was well-matched between SEM and SEM+SYN, and readers had a similar expectancy that the information after critical words could not eliminate the local anomaly
Summary
Language comprehension involves single word recognition and semantic integration of words according to certain syntactic rules. Any difference observed between SEM and SEM+SYN can be interpreted as a syntactic effect Employing this modified double violation paradigm, most studies seemed to support the view that, at least for Chinese, syntactic processing exerts influence until the relative late time window [20, 21]. Unlike Wang et al [4] and Yang et al [21], the target word was always a noun (NP2), which could avoid the confounding effect introduced by comparing different syntactic categories of critical words in different conditions [25, 27] Another novel aspect of the current study is that a new method, Residue Iteration Decomposition (RIDE) [33,34,35,36], was applied to the present data in addition to the conventional ERP analysis. As for the question of potential trial-to-trial latency variability influence, we used both traditional ERP analysis and the newer RIDE method to further and precisely investigate the effects elicited by SEM and SEM+SYN conditions
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