An electrophysiological exploration of modifiers embedded in different hierarchies: Insight from short passives in Mandarin

Brain Res. 2023 Mar 15:1803:148230. doi: 10.1016/j.brainres.2022.148230. Epub 2023 Jan 3.

Abstract

This event-related potentials study explored the processing of Mandarin short passives. We used a syntactic violation paradigm to compare the processing of two auxiliary phrases (i.e., a verb-modifier di-phrase and a noun-modifier de-phrase). In the control condition, the syntactic hierarchy of the di-phrase was lower than that of the de-phrase. In the violation condition, the low-level violation was created by replacing di with de in the auxiliary phrase, while the high-level violation was created by replacing de with di in the auxiliary phrase. The ERP data showed that the noun-modifier elicited the greater left anterior negativity (LAN) and the P600 than the verb-modifier, in both the control condition and the violation condition. We also observed that the LAN induced by the verb-modifier phrase was greater in the control condition than that in the violation condition, while the LAN induced by the noun-modifier was greater in the violation condition than that in the control condition. These results suggested that the greater cortical LAN-P600 might differentiate the high-level hierarchy from the low-level hierarchy. In addition, we tentatively claimed that given the same predicate argument structure, long passives might be the default representational mode of short passives (generally, a constructional alternation might be activated during the processing of the target structure).

Keywords: Chinese; ERPs; Hierarchy; Processing; Short passives.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Comprehension* / physiology
  • Electroencephalography
  • Evoked Potentials / physiology
  • Language
  • Protein Kinase Inhibitors
  • Semantics*

Substances

  • Protein Kinase Inhibitors