When “He” Can Also Be “She”: An ERP Study of Reflexive Pronoun Resolution in Written Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

The gender information in written Chinese third person pronouns is not symmetrically encoded: the character for “he” (, with semantic radical , meaning human) is used as a default referring to every individual, while the character for “she” (, with semantic radical , meaning woman) indicates females only. This critical feature could result in different patterns of processing of gender information in text, but this is an issue that has seldom been addressed in psycholinguistics. In Chinese, the written forms of the reflexive pronouns are composed of a pronoun plus the reflexive “/self” (/himself and /herself). The present study focuses on how such gender specificity interacts with the gender type of an antecedent, whether definitional (proper name) or stereotypical (stereotypical role noun) during reflexive pronoun resolution. In this event-related potential (ERP) study, gender congruity between a reflexive pronoun and its antecedent was studied by manipulating the gender type of antecedents and the gender specificity of reflexive pronouns (default: /himself vs. specific: /herself). Results included a P200 “attention related” congruity effect for /himself and a P600 “integration difficulty” congruity effect for /herself. Reflexive pronoun specificity independently affected the P200 and N400 components. These results highlight the role of /himself as a default applicable to both genders and indicate that only the processing of /herself supports a two-stage model for anaphor resolution. While both reflexive pronouns are evaluated at the bonding stage, the processing of the gender-specific reflexive pronoun is completed in the resolution stage.

Stereotypes override grammar: Social knowledge in sentence comprehension

“…Osterhout and colleagues (1997) reported qualitatively similar ERP effects for pronouns mismatching with either gender definition (mother, father) or the gender stereotype (nurse, doctor) of the previous antecedent. They reported increased positive amplitude shifts starting after 600 ms in the posterior scalp regions that they identified as P600s (similar results in Canal et al, 2015;Su et al, 2016). While some authors claimed that the P600 reflects syntactic processing (e.g., Kim & Osterhout, 2005), recent views suggest that it can reflect more general language integration (e.g., Brouwer et al, 2012), repair and reanalysis (e.g., Friederici, 2011) or more general conflict monitoring (e.g., van de Meerendonk et al, 2010; for a review Kuperberg, 2007).…”

“…Future research should address this issue. However, it is worth mentioning that previous studies on gender stereotypes (in which role nouns abounded) consistently reported P600 effects (Canal et al, 2015;Osterhout et al, 1997;Su et al, 2016) and no N400s. The present study differs from previous research by focusing on a full factorial design, on a different syntactic construction and on a morphology-rich language like Spanish.…”

“…We would expect different ERP correlates for the stereotypicality and the syntactic manipulations, i.e., an increased N400-like effect for stereotypes (White et al, 2009) and for grammatical anomalies a P600 that could be preceded by an Left Anterior scalp distributed Negativity (LAN) around 400 ms, an ERP correlate typically observed for morphosyntactic anomalies in morphology-rich languages (Barber & Carreiras, 2005;Molinaro et al, 2008;2011a;2011b;. This last prediction is motivated by both previous studies who employed a similar linguistic construction (determiner-noun gender agreement error involving animate nouns, e.g., Sabouring & Stowe, 2008) and previous research con stereotypes involving gender agreement mismatches (Canal et al, 2015;Osterhout et al, 1997;Su et al, 2016). Additive ERP effects could be observed in the double anomaly condition (Gunter et al, 2000;Martin-Loeches et al, 2006;Osterhout & Nicol, 1999).…”

Processing the Chinese Reflexive “ziji”: Effects of Featural Constraints on Anaphor Resolution

“…One widely used syntactic strategy is to argue that apparent long-distance binding effects can be derived from local dependencies. For example, Tang ( 1989 ) (see also Cole et al, 1990 ; Cole and Sung, 1994 ; Cole and Wang, 1996 , etc.) analyzed long-distance binding as involving a series of movements at the level of logical form such that each movement satisfies the requirement of local binding.…”

“…Native speakers' judgments vary regarding the ability of intervening third person referents to block long-distance binding. For example, Tang ( 1989 ) and Pollard and Xue ( 1998 ) treat blocking as a symmetric process whereby a difference in person feature between a local referent and a long-distance referent suffices to induce blocking (regardless of the person feature of the intervening referent). Based on this view, the matrix subject wo (“I”) in (3) cannot antecede the reflexive ziji , even though the intervening referent is third person.…”