| From the perspective of cognition,conditionals can be divided into logical conditionals and evidential conditionals according to the logical attributes of conditionals and “evidentiality” theory.Evidential conditionals do not operate completely in accordance with the rules of sufficient conditions,the intervention of sufficient conditions by various evidences has changed the nature of the conditional relationship.Reviewing the previous research,it is found that very few studies have empirically studied the processing of Chinese evidential conditionals from the perspective of cognitive neurolinguistics.In this study,ERPs technique is used to investigate the effects of the presence or absence of evidential markers on Chinese evidential conditionals.The research question of this study is as follows: Is there any difference in the processing of Chinese evidential conditionals with evidential marker and Chinese evidential conditionals without evidential marker and if there is difference,what is it?The study is completed in the Key Lab of Cognitive Neuroscience & Foreign Language Learning in SISU.A total of 20 subjects aged between 22 and 27 participant in the experiment,all of whom are right-handed.The experimental materials are 30 sets of Chinese evidential conditionals.Each group consists of one Chinese evidential conditionals without evidential marker,one Chinese evidential conditionals with evidential marker,and one filler sentence.During the experiment,each sentence is divided into groups of semantic-parts,and the subjects are required to judge the degree of acceptability of the stimuli by pressing the corresponding key.The EEG of this experiment is collected by Neuroscan 4.5 software.The behavioral data and ERP data are analyzed off-line.The results are input into SPSS 16.0 software for statistical analysis.By comparing the behavioral data,the ERPs data and the acceptability rating,the following results are finally obtained:(1)In the behavioral data,the response time of the Chinese evidential conditionals with evidential marker is significantly faster than Chinese evidential conditionals without evidential marker,and the acceptability rating of the Chinese evidential conditionals with evidential marker is higher than the acceptability of the Chinese evidential conditionals without evidential marker.(2)In the statistical results of ERPs data,Under the conditions of presentation and absence of the evidential marker,in the time window of 1000-2200 ms,there exist differences in four selected electrodes F4,C3,CZ and C4.When the evidential marker is presented,there is a more positive slow wave potential in the frontal area and central area.This means that when the evidential marker is presented,the subjects are easier to process the sentences.From the above results,it can be concluded that the evidential marker can promote the understanding and processing of Chinese evidential conditionals.Based on the above data analysis,the following conclusions are drawn: Some differences exist in processing Chinese evidential conditionals with evidential marker and Chinese evidential conditionals without evidential marker.The evidential marker functions as space-builders,which enables the subjects to establish a mental space and integrate the relevant knowledge they learned to establish a conditional-relation space.This process can reduce the difficulty of the subjects in understanding the sentence and ultimately lead the subjects to obtain the overall meaning of Chinese evidential conditionals.In summary,based on the above-mentioned discussion of the psychological processing of Chinese evidential conditionals with and without evidential marker,this study on Chinese evidential conditionals provides empirical basis for mental space theory proposed by Fauconnier(1985). |
