An ERP Approach To Gender Differences In Processing Different Chinese Causals

Causality is a kind of thinking mode and is fundamental both to the representation of knowledge and to other mental activities like predicting, explaining, and comprehending. The researches on causality come from many fields, such as philosophy, logic, linguistics and so on. Besides, the development of neurolinguistics ushers in new ways for studies on causality. Causality is common and diverse, of which the linguistic forms evolve into various types of causals. Liao(2004) divides causals into logical causals and evidential causals in light of whether they accord with the logic and fact in the world.This thesis attempts to explore whether and to what extent gender differences exist in processing different Chinese causals with the help of ERPs(Event-related Potentials) technique. Although gender differences in language processing are well documented in behavioral studies, electrophysiological studies with experimental materials of different Chinese causals exploring this topic are quite few. The experiment is conducted in key lab of cognitive neuroscience and foreign language learning in Sichuan International Studies University. The subjects are all postgraduates from SISU and experimental materials are divided into Chinese logical causals, Chinese evidential causals and filter sentences. This study adopts 2×2 experimental design. All subjects need to judge a sentence’s acceptability at the end. The experiment is designed with software E-prime 2.0 and data are recorded by the software Neuroscan 4.5. Then, the ERPs data are analyzed off-line and put into software SPSS 16.0 for statistical analysis. The conclusions are as follows:(1) Males pay more attention resources than females over processing Chinese logical causals. In the early time window of 50 ms to 150 ms, gender differences in processing Chinese logical causals are significant: males elicit more negative N100 than females(MF=-4.37μv, MM=-1.50μv; t=-3.82; p=0.003<0.05). Previous studies find that N100 is related to attention assignation in early processing. However, in the time window of 150 ms to 350 ms and 350 ms to 1100 ms, gender differences in processing Chinese logical causals are not significant.(2) Males pay more attention resources than females over processing Chinese evidential causals. In the early time window of 50 ms to 150 ms, gender differences in processing Chinese evidential causals are significant: males elicit more negative N100 than females(MF=-4.60μv, MM=-1.29μv; t=-4.34; p=0.001<0.05). However, in the time window of 150 ms to 350 ms and 350 ms to 1100 ms, gender differences in processing Chinese logical causals are not significant.(3) Both in males and females the waveforms evoked by Chinese logical causals and Chinese evidential causals have similar trend on frontal region, central region and temporal region. In males, the early components evoked by two kinds of Chinese causals have no significant difference. However, in the time window of 350 ms to 1100 ms, Chinese evidential causals evoke relatively more positive amplitude than Chinese logical causals. Similarly, in females, Chinese evidential causals also evoke relatively more positive amplitude than Chinese logical causals in the time window of 350 ms to 1100 ms. Therefore, Chinese evidential causals need more neural activities and cognitive resources to understand at later stage of semantic integration than Chinese logical causals no matter in males or females.