An ERPs Study Of Two Time Expressions In Chinese Processing By Native Speakers And Second Language Learners

In recent years,there has been a gradual increase in research on Chinese sentence processing using event-related potential(ERP)technology,however,there is a lack of research on the processing of Chinese bilingual temporal expressions.In this paper,we use the ERP technique as a method to observe the cognitive neural mechanisms of Chinese monolinguals and Indonesian high-level Chinese bilinguals during semantic and syntactic processing by means of a sentence acceptability judgment task,using a violation paradigm with two single past time processing modes in Chinese as the study point.This paper adopts an interdisciplinary empirical study to explore the factors that affect the processing of Chinese second language sentences,in order to provide a theoretical basis for future research on second language sentence processing.The experimental results of the Chinese native group show that the temporal adverb "cengjing" mainly involves the semantic category,and the semantic violation induces the N400 effect and the subsequent P600 effect at the semantic level;the highly grammaticalized aspectual particle "guo" is mainly related to the syntactic category,and syntactic violations induce syntactic-level P600 effects.And both temporal marker violations produce a sustained negative effect on post-keywords and final-words.The results of the experiment with Indonesian high-level Chinese bilinguals showed that the violation of the temporal adverb "cengjing" induced a monophasic P600 effect with a weaker amplitude than the native group,which represents a late repair during sentence processing after semantic violation.No significant LAN,N400,and P600 effects were observed for any of the aspectual particle "guo" violations.The verb after the aspectual particle "guo" produced a late prefrontal negative effect in the 400-800 ms time window,while neither the verb after the temporal adverb "cengjing" nor the final word produced a persistent negative effect.Overall,Indonesian bilinguals did not achieve similar high levels of sentence processing mechanisms as native speakers.The reason for this is that the similarity between the age of second language acquisition and the native and second language may be an influential factor.