The Role Of Semantic And Syntactic Information In Chinese Sentence Dominance Effects

In recent years,the sentence superiority effect at semantic or syntactic levels have been found in Japanese and French respectively（Asano ＆ Yokosawa,2011;Snell ＆ Grainger,2017）.Sentences that are semantically or syntactically correct are more easily recognized than strings that don’t conform to semantic or syntactic rules.It is well known that Chinese is different from Japanese and French in many ways.On the one hand,the verb tenses of Chinese and the change of part of speech provide clues to the syntactic structure,and its syntactic structure is not obvious as that of Japanese and French.In addition,Japanese consist of Kanji,Hiragana and Katakana,respectively as content words,function words and loan-word,this kind of structure can distinguish the semantic property from other information and thus facilitate semantic processing.Obtaining semantic information in Chinese is more dependent on context,indicating that extracting the semantic and syntactic information may appear later in Chinese compared with other languages.On the other hand,Chinese is a densely packed language,and is more visually complex.Moreover,there is no space between Chinese words,thus Chinese readers may obtain more information in a single gaze,and semantic and syntactic information may be processed comparatively rapid than other languages.The present study is to examine whether semantic and syntactic sentence superiority effects exist in Chinese.If there is a sentence superiority effect,does it support sequential or parallel processing?The present study included four experiments: Experiments 1 and 2 were to examine the sentence superiority effect at the semantic level,respectively,by using reaction time and eye movement recording techniques;Experiments 3 and 4 were to verify the sentence superiority effect at the syntactic level,respectively,by using reaction time and eye movement recording techniques.In Experiment 1 and 2,semantic plausibility and target word position（locations 1-5）were manipulated.The results showed that the sentence superiority effect is found at the semantic level in the accuracy rate,and there is no significant difference in the effect size of the five positions,which indicates that the sentence superiority effect also exists in Chinese,and semantic information can be extracted in parallel within a certain range.In Experiments 3 and 4,syntactic plausibility and target word position（locations 1-5）were manipulated.Compared with a scrambled agrammatical sequence,the reaction time is shorter and the accuracy is higher in a grammatically correct sentence,and the five positions have similar results,which suggests that the Chinese syntactic sentence superiority effect also exists,it also provides an empirical study for parallel syntactic information extraction in Chinese.The results demonstrate that readers can extract high order semantic and syntactic information within 200 ms,providing new evidence for parallel processing model.