Exploring the nature of the ‘subject’-preference: Evidence from the online comprehension of simple sentences in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

In two visual ERP studies, we investigated whether Mandarin Chinese shows a subject-preference in spite of the controversial status of grammatical relations in this language. We compared ERP responses at the position of the verb and the second NP in object-verb-subject (OVS) and subject-verb-object (SVO) structures. While SVO is the basic word order in Chinese and OV with subject-drop is possible, OVS is strongly dispreferred. At the position of the verb, which disambiguated towards an object or a subject reading of NP1, Experiment 1 revealed an N400 for both subject-initial control conditions in comparison with the critical object-initial condition. Experiment 2 showed that this result was due to differences in lexical-semantic relatedness between NP1 and the verb. When these were controlled for, we observed an N400 for the disambiguation towards an object-initial order, i.e., evidence for a subject-preference. At the postverbal NP, the object-initial condition showed a biphasic N400-late positivity pattern in both experiments. We interpret the N400 as reflecting the processing of an unexpected argument and the late positivity as a correlate of a well-formedness mismatch. Overall, our results suggest that Mandarin Chinese shows a subject-preference for an initial argument, thus providing further converging support for the notion that the subject-preference might constitute a universal processing strategy. We argue that the functional basis for this strategy lies in cross-linguistically applicable economy principles that serve to constrain incremental interpretation.

Acknowledgements

The research reported here was supported by a grant from the German Research Foundation as part of the research group ‘Grammar and processing of verbal arguments’ (FOR 742) and was conducted in collaboration with the Clinic for Audiology and Phoniatry (Prof. Manfred Gross) of the Charité Berlin. We are grateful to Katja Bruening for invaluable assistance in data acquisition and to Kerstin Flake for help in the preparation of the figures. We would also like to thank three anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on a previous version of the manuscript.

Notes

¹Note that, since the notion of an {S/A} correspondence is theory-neutral and, in principle, independent of all of the properties that are usually used as diagnostics for subjecthood (e.g., case marking, agreement, structural position, control properties, etc.), it is not a contradiction in terms to assume that a language without such subject properties (like Chinese) might show a preference for an S/A reading of an initial ambiguous argument during online language comprehension.

²Besides the basic word order SVO (Sun & Givón, 1985), OSV, SOV, and VOS are also found in spoken Chinese. However, these three word orders are pragmatically marked. Object-initial sentences – as used in the present study – highlight the topichood of the object (i.e., are used when the object conveys information that is available to both speaker and hearer). For a detailed discussion of the other two marked word orders, see Li (1990), Sun (1991), Li and Thompson (1981) on SOV and Lu (1980) on VOS.

³Note that, since NP2 was also the sentence-final constituent in both experiments, it cannot be excluded that the ERP effects observed at this position were partly influenced by processes of sentence wrap-up. However, sentence wrap-up in and of itself clearly cannot explain the more fine-grained modulations of the overall component pattern between Experiment 1 and Experiment 2.

⁴This would, in fact, appear to make for a relatively efficient overall processing strategy: minimal event-based processing decisions can be made locally (i.e. when no information is available beyond the ambiguous argument itself), whereas pragmatically-based processing choices will typically require further intra-sentential information.

⁵The seemingly radical claim that the language processing system might universally show an initial (early/local) {S/A}-preference appears to receive some support from typological patterns of language change. Thus, it has been observed that there is a higher likelihood for an ergative {S/P} pattern to change into an accusative {S/A} pattern than vice versa (e.g., Nichols, 1993, 2003). This tentatively suggests that there may be a ‘deeper’ basis to the {S/A}-preference.