Comprehending Chinese Logical Conditionals And Evidential Conditionals: An ERPs Study

Conditional relations can reflect how people perceive the world.Therefore,many scholars have studied conditional complex sentences,especially on English conditionals.However,few empirical studies are made on Chinese conditionals.Therefore,more efforts need making to study the online comprehending of Chinese conditionals.Based on the ERPs technique,this thesis aims to investigate the comprehending process of Chinese conditional complex sentences,to explore the EEG differences in comprehending the two types of sentences,and further to elaborate the construal frameworks.The research question is: What are the differences between comprehending logical conditionals and evidential conditionals?The experiment was conducted in the Key Lab of Cognitive Neuroscience and Foreign Language Learning in SISU,Chongqing,and a total of 25 postgraduates and undergraduates from SISU with Chinese as their native language participating in the experiment.This experiment adopted a one-factor within-subjects design with two levels(types of Chinese conditional complex sentences: logical conditionals and evidential conditionals).The experimental materials were presented in random.The subjects were required to carefully read and understand the sentences within a fixed time.After the whole sentence was presented,they needed to press the corresponding button to judge the acceptability of each conditional sentence basing on their full comprehension(3=totally acceptable;2=basically acceptable;1=totally unacceptable).The experiment was programmed with E-prime 2.0 software,and the computer recorded the response time and rating results when participants understand the conditionals.The EEG data were collected,recorded and offline analyzed by Neruoscan 4.5 and Syn Amps 2.Results were input into SPSS 23.0 statistical software for further statistical analyses.Experiment results are as follows:(1)In the light of behavioral result,the mean response time spent on logical conditionals is 1800.56 ms,and that spent on evidential conditionals is 2044.78 ms.There exists a significant difference in the response time of logical conditionals and evidential conditionals [t(19)=-2.56,p=.019<.05].(2)On the basis of ERPs results,a pronounced difference between amplitudes elicited by two types of conditionals is found during 500ms-800 ms [F(1,19)=5.844,p=.026<.05],and the amplitude elicited by evidential conditionals(-3.48±2.93)is larger than that elicited by logical conditionals(-1.82±3.21).The difference is mainly reflected over middle central region [t(20)=3.672,p=.002<.01],right central region [t(20)=2.928,p=.009<.01],middle parietal region [t(20)=3.491,p=.002<.01],and right parietal region [t(20)=2.663,p=.015<.05].In addition,the slow waves elicited by logical conditionals and evidential conditionals during 500ms-800 ms are different over the left and right brain hemispheres.According to the T-test,the discrepancy is most significant over the right hemisphere [t(20)= 2.358,p=.029<.05],which suggests that right hemispheres are mainly involved in comprehending logical and evidential conditionals.On the ground of the above results,the present study can draw the following conclusions:(1)The response time spent on evidential conditionals is more than that spent on logical conditionals.The slow wave elicited by evidential conditionals is more negative than that elicited by logical conditionals.Therefore,it is harder to comprehend evidential conditionals than logical conditionals,and more cognitive resources are needed to process evidential conditionals.(2)The differences in processing logical and evidential conditionals mainly lie over the central region,parietal region,and right hemisphere.