An ERP Study On Processing Zero Anaphor In Modern Chinese

Every language in the world has a complicated and complete system of anaphora.As a special process of language processing,anaphora analysis has become a focus of cognitive linguistics and neural linguistics research. Researches of pronominal and nominal anaphora are more than those of zero anaphora in terms of research types.When the anaphoric processing mechanism is concerned, contrastive studies between the mechanism of co-index and that of movement is not enough. Syntactic and semantic features such as the concreteness and specificity of antecedents is barely touched. At the same time, Chinese anaphora research is not enough.Such a situation needs further researches on the question of anaphora in Chinese.The technology of electrophysiology of nervous system is introduced to the studies of the processing of zero anaphora in Chinese.Through two experiments on the critical issues related to the type of antecedent and the underlying processing mechanism towards anaphoric processing.Thus under the same condition of antecedent,taking comparison of two kinds of anaphoric(co-indexation/movement) mechanism;under the same anaphoric mechanism, inspect the affect of antecedent which with different syntactic and semantic features in anaphoric processing.The study brings us a preliminary knowledge of Chinese zero anaphoric processing mechanism.The current article discovers that the influence of concreteness and definitiveness under sentence environment on processing of zero anaphora is very different from word environment.It shows that concrete noun antecedent in the processing of zero anaphora is more difficult than the abstract one. This is because concrete noun antecedent consists of more semantic information and need to consume more resource when the readers process zero anaphora. Under two condition of antecedent, the processing difficulty of verbs is different from the end words In co-indexation sentence.The article thinks the complexity is the joints efforts of the semantic characteristics of antecedents and thesentence structures.The article discovers a definite effect of antecedent in the processing of zero anaphora.This means that, when the antecedent is no-definite noun phrase but definite one,causes a difficulty in the processing of anaphora. The difference shows that SAN of the end words is more negative under definite antecedents condition, which is different from word condition. A definite effect under sentence environment has never been found before.At the same time,the co-indexation and movement structures get the different neural processing mechanism,the different zero anaphoric processing mechanisms have diverse processing difficulties.The co-indexation structures processing is different form the explain of Two Stage Model.Opposite the movement structures processing is in line with Two Stage Model. In addition,the interaction effect does not existed between the different anaphoric mechanisms and the concreteness or definitiveness of antecedent.