A Study On Neural Mechanism Of Anaphoric Processing In Mandarin Chinese

Anaphora is an essential link in language comprehension and it is a hot spot in all typesof linguistics, especially in Neural and Cognitive Linguistics. The existing research resultsnormally dealt with the time course and various influencing factors of anaphoric processing.Zero anaphora is less well established in terms of recent study result on the form of anaphor.And the semantic features of antecedents (animacy), which occupy an important semanticvariable, are also less involved. Furthermore advancing research is of great necessity in theunderlying anaphoric processing mechanism. This set of questions provide us with a newperspective on this issue.The technology of electrophysiology of nervous system is introduced to the stud y of theanaphora processing in Chinese. Two experiments are designed to investigate the effects ofdifferent types of anaphor, anaphoric mechanisms(co-indexation or movement) andantecedents (animacy or not) on anaphoric processing, so as to discuss the s imilarities anddifferences of three types of anaphor and two kinds of anaphoric mechanisms under theconditions of antecedents’ semantic features (animacy or not). By investigating Chineseanaphoric processing procedures, in combination of current anaphor ic theories andcharacteristic of Chinese, this paper arrives at the following conclusions.In our study, it showed that, the form of anaphor influence anaphoric processing. Differfrom Indo-European languages, the zero anaphoric processing isn’t the easiest in Chinese, thethree types of anaphor (noun/pronoun/null) have the same neural mechanism, a combinationof different levels in functional processing. Co-indexation and movement structures get thedifferent neural processing mechanisms, and the different anaphoric processing mechanismshave different processing difficulties. Animacy of antecedent affects anaphoric processing aswell, and the types of anaphor and the animacy of antecedent interact with each other.However, there are no interaction effects between the different anaphoric mechanisms and the animacy of antecedents.Moreover, the study of Chinese anaphora reveals nominal anaphoric processing is moredifficult than pronoun in the condition of animate, which conforms to the explanation ofAccessibility Theory, Centering Theory, Discourse Prominence Theory and Information LoadHypothesis. But no matter under animate or inanimate conditions, zero anaphoric processingdoesn’t meet the inference of Accessibility Theory. In addition, the study partly supports theTwo Stage Model, but two separated stages don’t exist in co-indexation structures, while theanaphoric processing of movement structures conforms to the prediction of Two Stage Model.Processing of zero anaphor and co-indexation structures partly confirms parallelism, andprocessing of movement structures proves the explanation of Active Trace Strategy andSyntactic Prediction Locality Theory.