Syntactic And Semantic Processing Of Chinese Middle Sentences

It is well-known in the academic field that sentence comprehension mainly involves syntactic processing and semantic processing. By means of event-related potentials(ERP), a research method of neuro-cognitive linguistics, many studies have been conducted on whether syntactic or semantic processing dominates in sentence comprehension, and two controversial views have been raised: syntactic processing dominance and semantic processing dominance.The former claims that syntactic analysis plays a vital role in sentence comprehension, and it is an independent procedure which often precedes semantic integration; whereas the latter proposes that sentence processing is mainly semantically driven and determined. To a large extent, these two controversial views can be attributed to the different languages that experimenters focused on. Research claiming syntactic dominance mostly concentrated on the inflectional Indo-European languages, such as English, German, etc. In contrast, studies holding semantic dominance usually selected paratactic language, for instance, Chinese, as the research object.Is the processing of Chinese sentences really different from that of Indo-European languages? In order to further investigate this issue, the present study conducted a research in Chinese middle construction by means of ERP technique. 18 undergraduates and postgraduates from Hunan University took part in the experiment, in which 150 Chinese middle sentences were provided. All the participants were asked to judge the acceptability of the stimuli materials. E-prime and ERP software were utilized to record and collect the behavioral and ERP data respectively. In addition, this paper also explored whether verbs with different category levels(basic-level and subordinate level categories) influence the semantic processing of Chinese middles. In all, the research questions involved in this study were presented as below:(1) In the processing of Chinese middle sentences(purely semantic violation, purely syntactic violation, and combined violation), what properties will be reflected in these three types of anomalies? Besides, will verbs with different category levels(basic and subordinate category level) affect the semantic processing of Chinese middles?(2) In the processing of Chinese middle sentences(single semantic violation and combined violation), is the evoked N400 effect different in these two anomalies?(3) In the processing of Chinese middle sentences(single syntactic violation and combined violation), is the elicited P600 effect different in these two violations?(4) Which one is more dominant in the processing of Chinese middle sentences, syntactic processing or semantic processing?Behavioral data showed that(1) the reaction time of combined violation was shortest,followed by is the purely syntactic anomaly, with the single semantic violation the longest.Compared single semantic violation with combined violation, a significant difference on their reaction time was revealed, but no such difference was found between single syntactic and combined anomaly. In addition, among these three anomalies, their accuracy was high and no significant difference was observed between any two items;(2) In comparison to sentences containing subordinate verbs, sentences with basic-level verbs enjoyed shorter reaction time and higher accuracy, which respectively displayed a significant difference.ERP data revealed that(1) the combined anomaly evoked both N400 and P600 effect, and the N400 amplitude was higher than that of single semantic anomaly, which demonstrated a significant difference; compared sentences containing subordinate verbs with that containing basic-level category verbs, the former evoked much higher N400 amplitude, and testified a significant difference with the latter;(2) as for the P600 amplitude, no significant difference was displayed between the combined anomaly and the purely syntactic violation.In the present study, the induction of N400 effect in the combined anomaly demonstrated that local syntactic anomaly did not block the integration of semantic information in the processing of Chinese middle sentences. In a deeper sense, syntactic structure parsing was not necessarily the prerequisite of semantic processing. Meanwhile, compared with the purely semantic anomaly, the increased N400 amplitude in the double violation further proved that Chinese, as a non-inflectional paratactic language, semantic information played a crucial role in sentence comprehension. Moreover, this study provided electro-physiological evidence for the advantage of basic-level category, and further demonstrated the dominance of basic-level category in human's perception.