Processing the Chinese language: An introduction

Abstract

The Chinese language possesses linguistic properties that are distinct from those of the most widely studied European languages. Given such uniqueness, research on the neurocognitive processing of Chinese not only contributes to our understanding of language-specific cognitive processes but also sheds light on the universality of psycholinguistic models developed on the basis of these European languages. In this Introduction, we briefly review neurocognitive studies on the processing of Chinese in the past ten years, summarizing existing findings concerning lexical, sentential, and discourse processing in Chinese.

Keywords:

• Chinese
• Lexical processing
• Sentence processing
• Discourse processing
• Event-related potential
• Functional magnetic resonance imaging