Cognitive Processing Of Chinese Semantic Errors

Early sentence processing studies supported that sentence processing is complete and exhaustive. Moses Illusion effects research challenged this view. Erickson and Mattson(1981) found that when readers are asked to answer the question “How many animals of each sort did Moses put on the Ark?” The answer given by half of the participants is “two,” didn’t notice the critical word is Noah, appeared a semantic plausibility "illusion", answered the question directly. This suggested that the sentence processing is not complete and exhaustive,language processing may be shallow and part. The debate of theoretical explanation and cross-linguistic difference about this phenomenon still continues. There are different cognitive processes between English and Germany. The debate between Reduced Awareness Hypothesis and Shallow Processing Hypothesis is in consciousness and immediacy.This research included two experiments, which were in rapid series of visual presentation paradigm for exploring the cognitive neural processes of good-fit semantic anomaly in mandarin. This research explored whether there exists Moses Illusion effect in mandarin processing, analyzed the process about it, and settled the argument between Reduced Awareness Hypothesis and Shallow Processing Hypothesis. Subjects who participated the experiment 1 have to finish the probe verification task after each trial. We explored whether there is Moses Illusion in mandarin immediate processing. Subjects who participated the experiment 1 have to finish the probe verification task after each trial. We explored whether there is Moses Illusion in mandarin immediate processing. We used plausibility judgement task to demand subjects make a decision about the anomalies in experiment 2 for exploring the reason and process about Moses illusion effect. Both of them are single factor(two levels)experiment.Results show that there exists Moses Illusion effect in mandarin processing, which share same electroencephalographic effect with English. It demonstrates subjects dependent on top-down predicting semantic process much more in good-fit anomaly processing with mandarin. Otherwise, subjects can detected the anomalies consciously and with an P600 effect showed when detected the anomalies. It supports Shallow Processing Hypothesis. This P600 effect may reflected the building of propositional representation.