A Study On Semantic Fit Of Argument During Chinese Sentence Processing

Verbs and nouns are essential components of a sentence. They are the basic grammatical units of the sentence, and have important influence on the generation and understanding of the sentence. In all literature of the processing mechanism of sentences, the literature which takes the verb as the core part has occupied a large amount of the research space; the role of the argument in sentence processing has not been systematically and deeply discussed. In the existing research literature on argument, argument is mostly just as a auxiliary word of the verb. In sentence processing, the number of the literature which takes the argument as the core part is relatively small, and the number of the study which focuses on semantic fit of argument is less.Argument is a noun phrase with thematic roles in the sentence, and plays an important role in the process of the sentence. In view of the above research status about argument, this research focuses on the semantic fit of argument, and discusses the influence of argument on sentence processing. In this study, we use event related potential technology and two factors (semantic fit of argument, cognitive control ability) mixed experimental design, by setting four different types of sentences:the appropriate argument, the inappropriate character argument, the inappropriate animal argument and the inappropriate inanimate argument, using the correct rate and EEG data as analysis index to study the mechanism of semantic fit of argument during sentence processing. In addition, before the EEG experiment, through the classical Stroop experiment, the high and low cognitive control groups are selected to study the impact of cognitive control on semantic fit of argument.Research results show:(1) For N1 component:The main effect of the sentence type is significant in both the middle and the two sides electrodes; Further post hoc tests find that the differences between the appropriate argument sentence and the three kinds of inappropriate argument sentences are significant; But in the three kinds of inappropriate argument sentences, the differences between the inappropriate animal argument sentence and the inappropriate inanimate argument sentence is not significant.(2) For P200 component:The main effect of the sentence type is significant in both the middle and the two sides electrodes; Further post hoc tests are consistent with the Nl component; In addition, on both sides of the electrode, the main effect of the cognitive control ability is significant; Further post hoc tests show that the P200 amplitude of the high cognitive control ability is significantly higher than that of the low cognitive control ability; On the midline electrode, the interaction between sentence type and the cognitive control ability is significant.Research conclusions:(1) Compared to appropriate argument sentences, inappropriate argument sentences were tested with less discrimination. From the time processing, with the gradual reduction of the semantic fit of the sentence, the subject will gradually reduce the degree of discrimination processing;This can be confirmed from the inappropriate argument sentences evoke less significant N1 effect than that of appropriate argument sentences.(2) With the gradual reduction of semantic fit of the argument, the target feature of the argument is gradually strengthened and more attention has been put in, then evoking more The subjects with high cognitive control abilityP200 effect.(3) Due to;the limited cognitive resources, when the semantic level of argument beyond a certain value, they will show cognitive economic tendency in cognitive strategy; Namely, for inappropriate argument sentences, subjects will automatically abandon for deeply processing, in order to save limited cognitive resources.(4) In sentence processing, argument semantic fit processing is influenced by reader's cognitive control ability:The high cognitive control ability is tested with a higher P200 amplitude than that of the low cognitive control ability, which indicates that the subjects with high cognitive control ability pay more attention to the argument processes. But in judging the difference among the three kinds of inappropriate argument sentences, the subjects with high cognitive control ability are less significant than that of the subjects with low cognitive control ability.