Syntactic And Semantic Processing Of Chinese Long Passive Bei Sentences

By means of event-related potentials (ERP), a researching method of neuro-cognitive linguistics, many studies in psycho-linguistic area have been conducted on whether syntactic or semantic processing dominates in sentence comprehension; It is well-known in the academic field that sentence comprehension mainly involves syntactic and semantic processing. And two controversial opinions have been raised:one is syntactic processing dominance and the other semantic processing dominance. The former believes that syntactic analysis plays a crucial role through sentence comprehension, besides; it is an independent procedure which precedes semantic integration; whereas the latter proposes that sentence processing is mainly semantically driven and determined. To a large extent, these two contrary controversial views can be attributed to the different languages that experimenters studied on. Researches claiming syntactic dominance mostly concentrated their target on the inflectional Indo-European languages, such as English, German, etc. On the contrary, studies holding semantic dominance view usually selected para-tactic language, for instance, Chinese, as the research material.Does the processing of Chinese sentences really differ from these of Indo-European languages? In order to further fully investigate this issue, the present study conducted a research in Chinese long passive construction: NP1+BEI+NP2+VERB+COMPLEMENTARY by means of ERP technique.18 postgraduates from Hunan University took part in the experiment, in which 140 Chinese long passive sentences including 20 filler sentences were provided. The participants were asked to judge the acceptability of all the stimuli materials. E-prime and ERP software were used to respectively record and collect the behavioral and ERP data. In addition, this paper also explored whether verbs with different complements (result complement, position complement and direction complement) influence the semantic processing of Chinese long passives. All in all, the research questions involved in this study were listed as below:(1) In the processing of Chinese long passive sentences (purely semantic violation, purely syntactic violation, and combined violation), what ERP properties will occur under these three types of anomalies? Besides, will different complements in long passive (result complement, position complement and direction complement) affect the semantic processing of long Chinese passive sentences?(2) In the processing of long Chinese passive sentences (single semantic violation and combined violation), what is the difference between the evoked N400 in the two anomalies?(3) During the processing of long Chinese passive sentences (single syntactic violation and combined violation), what is the difference between these two violations?(4) Which processing is more dominant in the understanding of Chinese long passive sentences, syntactic processing or semantic processing?Behavioral data showed that (1) the reaction time of combined semantic and syntactic violation was the shortest, followed by is the single syntactic violation, with the purely semantic anomaly longest. Comparing single semantic violation with combined violation, a significant difference on their reaction time was found, but no such difference was found between single syntactic and combined anomaly. Besides, among these three anomalies, their accuracy was very high and no significant difference was observed between any two items of the four; (2) In comparison to sentences with different complement, sentences with result complement enjoyed the shortest reaction time and high accuracy, and sentences with direction and position complement enjoyed the longest reaction time and high accuracy which respectively displayed a significant difference.The collected ERP data revealed that (1) the combined anomaly evoked not only P600 but also N400 effect, and the N400 amplitude was larger than that of semantic-only anomaly, which demonstrated a significant difference between them; (2) as for the P600 amplitude, the author could see no significant difference displaying between the combined semantic and syntactic anomaly and the purely syntactic violation.In the present study, the induction of N400 effect in the combined anomaly demonstrated that local syntactic anomaly did not prevent the integration of semantic information during Chinese long passive sentences processing. To a deeper meaning, semantic processing was not totally determined by syntactic structure parsing. Meanwhile, comparing with the purely semantic anomaly, the increased N400 amplitude in the double violation further proved that Chinese, as a non-inflectional para-tactic language, semantic information played a crucial role in sentence comprehension. Moreover, this study provided electro-physiological evidence for the advantage of children acquisition sequence effect, and further demonstrated children acquisition sequence plays a role in adults’language sentence processing.