A sheet of coffee: an event-related brain potential study of the processing of classifier-noun sequences in English and Mandarin

ABSTRACT

Comprehension of classifier-noun sequences was examined in separate studies in English and Mandarin by comparing event-related brain potential (ERP) responses to classifier-noun matches (a sheet of paper) and mismatches (a sheet of coffee) embedded in sentences. One goal was to determine which ERP components are sensitive to such mismatches, as a clue about the nature of the underlying combinatorial processes. Another goal was to examine effects of classifier constraint strength (a piece of …  vs. a sheet of … ) on anticipation of a subsequent noun. Results were similar in the two languages, which is remarkable given substantial differences between them in classifier usage. In both languages, nouns evoked larger N400s in mismatching classifier-noun sequences, suggesting that combinatorial processing was primarily semantic, and general classifiers evoked a larger sustained frontal negativity than specific classifiers starting 200 milliseconds after classifier onset, reflecting effects of constraint strength on anticipation of the upcoming noun.

KEYWORDS:

• Sentence comprehension
• anticipatory processing
• classifiers
• N400
• sustained frontal negativity

Acknowledgments

We thank Kara Federmeier, Cynthia Fisher, Jerry Packard, and Darren Tanner for helpful suggestions, and Gabriela Elizalde-Ocala, Michael Hudgins, Young Jae Lee, Raeann Sheley, Keqi Wei, and other undergraduate lab assistants for help with data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Federmeier et al. (2005) only found this effect when the sentence-final word was presented in the right visual field (RVF), which supports their hypothesis that prediction in language is the province of the left hemisphere because of its primary responsibility for language production, which requires planning ahead (Federmeier, 2007).

2. In most of the studies showing effects of contextual constraint strength on the amplitude of the predictable word's P2, constraint has been built up across multiple words, so there's not a clear single word making the target word predictable (Federmeier et al., 2005; Wlotko & Federmeier, 2007, 2011; cf. Huang et al., 2010).

3. The results are not reported here for the condition with missing classifiers for two reasons. First, because the number+classifier were presented together in a single display in Experiment 2, the response to the one-character number-alone display differed substantially from that to the two-character number+classifier display, in part simply because of the difference in number of characters. Since that display immediately preceded the critical noun, such differences made it impossible to determine an appropriate baseline for comparing responses to the critical nouns in the classifier-missing condition to the other conditions. Second, responses in the classifier-missing condition appeared to change across the session, so we decided to collect more data to further explore those changes.

4. There were three lists in this study so the match, mismatch, and missing versions of an item were not seen by the same person.

5. We can only assume that the same difference in frequency of occurrence must also have been true for Chou et al.’s (2014) strongly and weakly constraining classifiers, but they did not report the frequency of occurrence of their classifiers.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by the Dissertation Completion Fellowship and the Network for Neuro-Cultures Graduate Training Fellowship from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to Zhiying Qian.