The Effect Of Causal Connective On The Processing Of Different Types Of Chinese Causals

As one of the means of constructing a coherent discourse,connectives play a very important role in sentence comprehension.Connectives can express relationships such as parataxis,adversative,causality,assumption and time sequence and so on.Among those different kinds of connectives,causal connectives have aroused great interest of researchers.However,from the previous studies,we find that there are relatively few studies related to the influence of causal connectives on the processing of Chinese causals.The current research chooses the most representative causal connective“yinwei(因为)…suoyi(所以)”as the research object and adopts ERPs technique to explore the effect of the causal connective on the processing of two different types of Chinese causals——the logical causals and the evidential causals.This research chooses fifteen postgraduates majoring in English from SISU as subjects. Research materials are presented to the subjects on the computer screen in random order one by one, each for the duration of 5000 ms. Then a scale of acceptability will appear on the screen. The subjects are required to judge whether the sentence is acceptable or not and respond as soon as possible. The behavioral data and the ERPs data are recorded by computer. All the behavioral data and ERPs data are put into the statistic software SPSS 16.0. The experiment is completed in the Key Lab of Cognitive Neuroscience & Foreign Language Learning in SISU.According to the analysis of behavioral data and ERPs data, this research arrives at the following conclusions: 1)For the two conditions(with and without causal connective) of the logical causals, the mean response time of the logical causals without connective(945.05ms) is longer than that of the logical causals with connective(828.85ms), and there is a significant distinction in response time(t=-2.514, p=0.029), which means the participants process the logical causals faster when the causal connective is present. From the ERPs data, there is significant difference of the average amplitude in the selected electrodes FP1(MP=0.55 uv, Ma=-2.24uv; t=3.476, p=0.005)and FPZ(MP=0.15 uv, Ma=-3.23uv; t=3.476, p=0.037) respectively during the time window of 2900-5000 ms. When the causal connective is present, the logical causals are characterized by a significant positive slow-cortical wave in the frontal pole and the left temporal area, which means the processing of the logical causals is easier when the causal connective is present; 2)For the two conditions of the evidential causals, the mean response time of the evidential causals with connective(1108.97ms) is a little bit longer than that of the evidential causals without connective(1037.28ms), and there is no significant distinction in response time(t=1.012, p=0.333). From the ERPs data, there is significant difference of the average amplitude in the selected electrode FPZ(MP=1.69 uv, Ma=-3.17uv; t=2.270, p=0.042)during the time window of 2900-5000 ms. When the causal connective is present, the evidential causals elicit more positive slow-cortical waves in the area of the frontal pole, the frontal, the left temporal and the parietal, which means the processing of the evidential causals is easier when the causal connective is present. As a whole, the presence of the causal connective facilitates the processing and comprehension of both the logical causals and the evidential causals.