Processing Of Chinese Bei Sentences By Chinese And German Speakers-an ERP Study

One standing issue that the field of psycholinguistics has been centered on isthe timing of syntactic and semantic information at play during real-time languageprocessing. Two contrasting approaches to sentence processing are the modularsyntax-first model and the parallel interactive model, with supporting evidence forthe former mostly from German, and the latter from Chinese. Both German andChinese have the passive construction, making it a feasible structure to evaluate thetwo approaches, whereas existing ERP work has rarely studied the long passivestructure in Chinese. The present study aims to fill this research gap by comparinghow Chinese native speakers and German-L1, Chinese-L2learners process Chinesepassive sentences, and to probe the issue of whether L2learners can acquirenative-like processing strategies.This study consisted of two ERP experiments, both using the Chinese longpassive structure with the passive marker BEI—also called the BEI sentences,NP1+BEI+NP2+Vt). The crucial manipulation was the semantic consistency andsyntactic category of the critical verb, yielding Correct, Semantic-Anomaly,Syntactic-Anomaly, and Double-Anomaly conditions. Experiment1investigatedhow native speakers of Chinese process the Bei sentences. Results showed that theDouble Anomaly condition triggered both an N400effect and P600effect. Thesepatterns are inconsistent with the Syntax-first approach.Experiment2investigated how advanced-level L2learners whose nativelanguage is German processed Chinese passive sentences. Results showed a reducedN400effect in the Double Anomaly condition in the frontal areas; moreover, a lateand sustained negativity was found in all three anomalous conditions. Thesepatterns are again in consistent with the syntax-first approach.Taken together, the ERP data suggest that the processing differencesdemonstrated in prior work using either the morphology-rich German or thesemantics-driven Chinese might be traced to the intrinsic differences between these two languages. Furthermore, the results indicate that it is possible for proficient L2learners to acquire native-like processing strategies, despite the influence from L1.