Plausibility and Syntactic Reanalysis in Processing Novel Noun-noun Combinations During Chinese Reading: Evidence From Native and Non-native Speakers

ABSTRACT

We aimed to tackle the question about the time course of plausibility effect in on-line processing of Chinese nouns in temporarily ambiguous structures, and whether L2ers can immediately use the plausibility information generated from classifier-noun associations in analyzing ambiguous structures. Two eye-tracking experiments were conducted to explore how native Chinese speakers (Experiment 1) and high-proficiency Dutch-Chinese learners (Experiment 2) on-line process 4-character novel noun-noun combinations in Chinese. In each pair of nominal phrases (Numeral+Classifier+Noun1+Noun2), the plausibility of Classifier-Noun1 varied (plausible vs. implausible) while the whole nominal phrases were always plausible. Results showed that the plausibility of Classifier-Noun1 associations had an immediate effect on Noun1, and a reversed effect on Noun2 for both groups of participants. These findings indicated that plausibility plays an immediate role in incremental semantic integration during on-line processing of Chinese. Similar to native Chinese speakers, high-proficiency L2ers can also use the plausibility information of classifier-noun associations in syntactic reanalysis.

Consent to participate

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Ethics approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In Staub et al. (2007), they used novel compound words (e.g., cafeteria manager) and familiar compound words (e.g., mountain lion), although it is not clear whether or not their “familiar compound words” have been lexicalized and have their own independent entries in a dictionary as defined in the current research. Nonetheless, these two groups of compound words did not differ significantly regarding the plausibility effect on the initial noun region in Staub et al. (2007), since they reported null compound type by plausibility interaction on any region.

2. The number of participants was decided based on the results of the power analysis on a pilot study of 40 native Chinese speakers with the exact same materials and procedure. These 40 participants’ gaze duration on Noun1 were analyzed using linear mixed effect model focusing on the effect of plausibility condition. The powerSim function (Judd, Westfall, & Kenny, 2012) was used to test the statistical power of this model. Results showed that the power would reach .85 with 60 participants.

3. The plausibility and acceptability of the Cl-Noun1 associations was normed by 10 native Chinese speakers using a 5-point scale, in which 1 stands for implausible while 5 stands for plausible. The averaged norming score of the Cl-Noun1 associations in the plausible condition was 4.85, which is significantly higher than that in the implausible condition (M = 1.12), p < .001.

4. The plausibility and acceptability of the nominal phrases in general was normed in a similar way by 10 native Chinese speakers. The results indicated that nominal phrases in two conditions were equally plausible and acceptable to native Chinese speakers: M_plausible = 4.61, M_implausible = 4.67, p = .54. Furthermore, the familiarity and acceptability of the Noun1+Noun2 combinations was normed by a different group of 10 native Chinese speakers using a 5-point scale, in which 1 stands for very strange and inacceptable, while 5 stands for familiar and acceptable. The results indicated that these combinations in two conditions did not differ significantly in their familiarity and acceptance: M_plausible = 4.65, M_implausible = 4.74, p = .28.

5. The log-transformed data of fixation measures yield the same pattern of statistical significance as the analysis based on the raw data. In the interest of transparency of effect sizes, we report the analysis of the untransformed data here.

6. The number of L2 participants in Experiment 2 (30) was less than the number of native participants in Experiment 1 (60). This was due to the fact that there were limited number of available high-proficiency Dutch-Chinese learners. However, this did not mean that the data of L2 participants was under-powered. L2 participants’ TT on Noun1 were analyzed using linear mixed effect model focusing on the effect of plausibility condition. The powerSim function (Judd et al., 2012) was used to test the statistical power of this model. Results showed that the power reached .80 with 30 L2 participants.

7. Two off-line tests were conducted before the critical eye-tracking experiment to make sure that all L2 participants were familiar with the critical nouns (both Noun1 and Noun2) and the Cl-Noun1 and Cl-Noun2 associations used in the current study. The first test was a lexical definition test in which participants were asked to explain the meanings of some Chinese nouns in both Dutch and Chinese. The second test was a gap-filling test in which participants were asked to fill in proper classifiers in the brackets in nominal phrases such as [一 () 毛衣] (one () sweater). Dutch-Chinese learners whose accuracy in these two tests were higher than 90% were selected as our L2 participants. Through these two tests, we were assured that all L2 participants in the current experiment have already acquired the basic and necessary lexical knowledge of the classifiers and nouns used in the current research.

8. We thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.

9. We thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.

10. We thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.

Additional information

Funding

This research project is supported by Science Foundation of Beijing Language and Culture University (supported by “the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities”) (21YBB33) and a grant from AThEME Project (Advancing the European Multilingual Experience, EU FP7 Grant 613465) to Panpan Yao, and Taif University Researchers Supporting Project number (TURSP-2020/173) to Reem Alkhammash. This work was also jointly funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) and the German Research Foundation (DFG) in Project Crossmodal Learning, NSFC61621136008/DFG TRR-169. This research was also supported by a grant from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31970992). The original data and codes are available from DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/RPFYV.