When Chinese semantics meets failed syntax

Abstract

Previous event-related potential studies in Indo-European languages reported a surprising finding that failed syntactic category processing appears to block lexical-semantic integration, suggesting a functional primacy of syntax over semantics. An event-related potential experiment was conducted to test whether there is such primacy in Chinese sentence reading, using sentences containing either semantic only violations, combined syntactic category and semantic violations, or no violations. Semantic only violations elicited a centro-parietal negativity and combined violations a broadly distributed, but centro-parietally focused negativity, both in the 300-500 ms window and followed by a P600, suggesting that semantic integration proceeds even when syntactic category processing fails. Thus, there is no functional primacy of syntactic category over semantic processes during Chinese sentence reading.

The time course of semantic and syntactic processing in Chinese sentence comprehension: Evidence from eye movements

“…For example, in the following sentences, mantic violation, and semantic syntactic violation), and matching the degree of semantic violation between the semantic violation and the semantic syntactic violation conditions, Yu and Zhang (2008) found that the effects of a semantic syntactic violation did not appear earlier than the effect of a pure semantic violation. Whereas pure semantic violations elicited a centro-parietal negativity, combined violations elicited a broadly distributed, but centro-parietally focused negativity, in both the 300 to 500-msec window and the following P600.…”

“…More recently, using the violation paradigm, researchers have investigated ERP correlates of semantic and syntactic violations (Ye, Luo, Friederici, & Zhou, 2006;Yu & Zhang, 2008). Ye et al found that syntactic processing was different from semantic processing in auditory comprehension of Chinese sentences.…”

“…As in Chen's (1999) study, a CW (a single-character word 2 ) in a sentence was altered to form three kinds of violation conditions: congruent (CON), a semantic violation (SEM), and both a semantic and a syntactic violation (SEM SYN). Furthermore, as in Yu and Zhang's (2008) study, an improvement was made on Chen's (1999) studies such that the degree of semantic violation of the SEM and SEM SYN conditions was closely matched via rating studies. Therefore, any possible differences in eye movement patterns between the two violation conditions should be attributed to syntactic processing, instead of differing degrees of semantic violation across the conditions.…”

Re-examination of Chinese Semantic Processing and Syntactic Processing: Evidence from Conventional ERPs and Reconstructed ERPs by Residue Iteration Decomposition (RIDE)

“…One of the core concerns in human sentence comprehension is the relative time course of and interplay between semantic and syntactic processing [1][2][3][4][5][6]. A large number of studies have been carried out on Indo-European languages, however, there is still much debate regarding the interplay between semantic and syntactic processes.…”

“…Apart from this, Chinese permits a number of word order permutations. Given the unique properties of this logographic writing system, in recent years Chinese, especially Chinese syntactic processing, has attracted many psychologists' attention [5,6,[20][21][22]. Some early studies on Chinese syntactic processing tried to adopt exactly the same logic used in Indo-European studies in manipulating a pure syntactic violation condition [14,23].…”