An ERP Study On Integration Mechanism Of Negation Marker During Chinese Sentence Processing

Negation marker,which also named negators,plays a important syntactical role in negative sentence accessing,there needs only one negative marker on expressing negative meanings among any languages.There exits two negation marker which commonly used by Chinese called "bu"and "mei".The key of grasping negation sentence is negation marker and negation focus.This study investigated the integration mechanism of negation marker during Chinese sentence processing and the effect of working memory on the integration by using event-related potentials such as P300 and P600 combined with behavior research methods and two factors within-subjects design(working memory*sentence type).Four types criticized sentences were designed based on the experimental objective:low working memory load on affirmative sentence,low working memory load on negative sentence,high working memory load on affirmative sentence,high working memory load on negative sentence.The results showed that:(1)The P300 amplitude induced with high working memory load greater significantly than with low working memory load.So the P300 can be the indication of work memory,and the more difficulty in work memory updating,the larger P300 amplitude will induce.In addition,P300 latency was shorter in our research which caused by the easy task of distinguishing the sentence between high working memory load and low working memory load,so the latency of P300 may reflect the time of evaluating stimulate and task,specifically,the more difficulty the task was,the shorter latency the P300 was.(2)There are no significant differences between negative sentence and affirmative sentence on the amplitude of P600 with low working memory,the results indicate that during the early period of negation sentence,the subject firstly access the negated state of affair;Besides,the P600 amplitude induced by negative sentence greater significantly than affirmative sentence,which indicates that subject already access the actual state of affair.The results show that with the low working memory load,the integration mechanism of negation marker support the two-step simulation hypothesis;with the high working memory load,the integration mechanism support the fusion model.The results also show that:when the task was easy,the subject access the sentence by using perceptual symbol;when the task was difficult,the subject access the sentence by using propositional symbol.(3)The interaction between work memory and sentence type was significant.The results indicated that the research support single verbal resource theory during the the early period of sentence processing.