Two-stage interaction between word order and noun animacy during online thematic processing of sentences in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

How different sources of linguistic information are used during online language comprehension is a central question in psycholinguistic research. This study used eye-tracking and electrophysiological techniques to investigate how and when word order and noun animacy interact with each other during online thematic processing of Mandarin Chinese sentences. The initial argument in the sentence is animate or inanimate and the following verb disambiguates it as an agent or patient. The results at the verb revealed that, at the early processing stage, the patient-first sentences elicited longer gaze duration and larger N400 than the agent-first ones only when the initial argument was inanimate; however, at the late stage, the patient-first sentences elicited prolonged second-pass time and enhanced P600 only when the initial argument was animate. In addition, the brain oscillations at the verb also showed different patterns in the early and later window latencies. The present results suggested that the online thematic processing of Mandarin Chinese sentences involves not only universal processing strategies (subject-preference) but also language-specific strategies as well. That is, in Mandarin Chinese, noun animacy interacts with word order immediately during online sentence comprehension; the initial processing results can be overridden by additional interpretively relevant information types at a later stage. Those results provided important indications for the language comprehension models.

Keywords:

• argument interpretation
• word order
• animacy
• subject-preference

Notes

1. In the 300–400 ms window latency, when the initial argument was animate, the agent-first condition elicited marginally significantly larger N400 than the patient-first condition over the midline electrodes, F _midline(1, 16) =4.13, MSE = 4.22, p = 0.059, but not over the lateral electrodes, F _lateral(1, 16) = 2.40, MSE = 4.72, p = 0.141.

2. aAV indicates ‘animate, agent-first’; aPV indicates ‘animate, patient-first’; inAV indicates ‘inanimate, agent-first’; inPV indicates ‘inanimate, patient-first’.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31271091).