A Study Of The Effects Of Prosody On Words,Phrases And Sentences Processing In Chinese

Prosody comprises stress,intonation and rhythm and so on.Due to its important role in the understanding of spoken language,there was adequate attention to it by many researchers.Substantial research on prosody in the area of spoken language has hence been carried out and yielded some fruits.Nevertheless,little is known about the effects of prosody on silent reading comprehension.As a basic graphic unit of Chinese,syllable number and syllable collocation(rhythmic scheme)of Chinese character not only play a vital role in silent reading comprehension,but also have significant impacts on the development and evolution of Chinese.So far,precursor research on Chinese syllable number and syllable collocation in prosody has only been confined to the theoretical level,while the empirical studies are relatively sparse.Consequently,based on the explanatory analyses of the research on the effects of prosody,such as stress,prosodic boundary etc.on language processing home and abroad,this paper attempts to investigate the effects of Chinese syllable number and syllable collocation on language processing to reveal the essence of the relation between prosody and language processing at different levels.Chinese native speakers participated in the experiments in which ERP technique was deployed.Altogether there were three studies in current research.Study 1 investigated the effects of prosody on word processing,mainly concerning the effects of the syllable number of noun and verb on the online processing of OVN compound word(eg."shu cai pei song zhong xin","da suan zhong zhiji di")in Chinese by employing ERP technique.Study 2 examined the effects of prosody on phrase processing,that is,the effects of syllable number and syllable collocation on the order of multi-item attribute of binding noun by utilizing questionnaire method and ERP technique.Study 3 explored the effects of prosody on sentence processing.The constraints of prosody in the sentences of "predicate-complement followed by object",that is,the constraint condition between predicate-complement construction and syllable number as well as the corresponding relationship between neutral tone and syllable,were discussed with ERP technique.The following is the findings of the three studies.1.The change of both noun and verb syllable number were activated in the early stage of compound word processing,and it elicited N100.No matter what the changes were brought about by the syllable number of noun or verb,the compound word elicited N400.And N400 elicited by the violation of the verb syllable number was significantly greater than that of noun syllable number.The results indicated that the change of syllable number not only led to the change of the sensory processing in the early stage of compound word understanding,but also impeded the semantic processing of compound word.And the violation degree of the change of verb syllable number on semantic processing of compound word was greater than that of noun syllable number.In addition,the monosyllable and disyllable in prosody possessed their own independent characteristics beyond syntax and semantics.Syllable collocations not only reflected the degree of tightness of prosody,but also showed the corresponding relation to the tightness of syntax and semantic:tighter[2+1]while looser[1+2].2.In the phrase processing,the change of syllable number was activated in the early stage of phrase processing and it elicited N100.However,N100 was not elicited by the change of syllable collocation.The result indicated that syllable collocation and syllable number,which were both prosodic information,had different processing mechanism.The violation of syllable number and syllable collocation elicited sustained negativity.There was a significant interaction between prosody and semantic in attribute-head phrase processing which was influenced by uncommon phrase structure stored in mental lexicon.In addition,both prosody and semantic imposed effects on the order of attributes,while the priority of semantic principles should be attached with conflicts between prosodic principles and semantic principles.3.Syllable number had effects on the online processing of the sentences of"predicate-complement followed by object".The neutral tone in complement only elicited P600 without N120 and N400,which showed the interaction between prosody and syntax in the late stage of sentence comprehension.And P600 indicated neutral tone,less than one syllable,had different processing mechanism from the common tone.The neutral tone didn't impede semantic processing,but impeded syntactic processing and its post integration process.Based on the above findings,it can be found that the word,phrase and sentence processing was not only affected by syntax and semantic,but also by prosody.By analyzing the different language processing viewpoints from the generative grammar theory,cognitive linguistics theory,the parallel architecture theory and prosodic syntax theory,it can be suggested that prosody,syntax and semantic had impacts on language processing.Moreover,prosody,especially syllable number and syllable collocation,played a significant role in language processing.And monosyllable/disyllable can be regarded as Chinese distinct morphological marker,which had independent grammatical function.Therefore,great importance should be attached to the function of prosody in language processing in Chinese language studies.