An ERP study of the processing of epistemic modality adverbs yexu and yiding in Mandarin Chinese.

Numerous studies have demonstrated that word frequency influences sentence processing. However, the impact of frequently used epistemic modality adverbs on sentence processing is less clear. The aim of the present study is to investigate the processing of Chinese epistemic modality adverbs by means of ERPs (event-related potentials) based on degrees of modal certainty encoded by different orthographic forms of two epistemic adverbs yexu (possibly) and yiding (surely) co-occurred with two psychological verbs guji (estimate) and quexin (convince) in Mandarin Chinese sentences as Wo guji Xiaolin yexu hui jingxuan banzhang (I estimate Xiaolin possibly future compete monitor). Two conditions (i.e. agreed and disagreed conditions) are constructed through manipulating the agreement of the certainty degree between the psychological verbs and the epistemic adverbs. Twenty-four enrolled Chinese college students took part in the ERP experiment. The results showed that the epistemic adverb yexu (possibly) in disagreed sentences (quexin &yexu) relative to agreed sentences (guji &yexu), elicited a monophasic P600 effect with a centro-parietal distribution, indicating extra syntactic costs in processing the epistemic adverb in sentences with modal uncertainty. The absence of N400 was observed for processing yexu (possibly) in the agreed and disagreed sentences, suggesting that little semantic processing difficulty of the epistemic adverb happens in sentences with modal certainty and/or uncertainty. While for the epistemic adverb yiding (surely) in the agreed and disagreed sentences, the absence of P600 and N400 indicates that little difficulty in syntactic and/or semantic processing of the epistemic adverb happens in sentences with modal certainty and/or uncertainty.

An ERP study on Chinese natives' second language syntactic grammaticalization.

The present study is concerned with how the Chinese learners of English grammaticalize different English syntactic rules. The ERPs (event related potentials) data were collected when participants performed English grammatical judgment. The experimental sentences varied in the degree of the similarity between the first language Chinese (L1) and the second language English (L2): (a) different in the L1 and the L2; (b) similar in the L1 and the L2; (c) unique to the L2. The P600 effect was found in L2 for structures that are similar in the L1 and the L2 and that are unique in L2, but there was no P600 effect of sentence type for the mismatch structures. The results indicate L1-L2 similarity and L2 proficiency interact in a complex way.

Processing temporal agreement in a tenseless language: an ERP study of Mandarin Chinese.

Human languages are equipped with an impressive repertoire of time-encoding devices which vary significantly across different cultures. Previous research on temporal processing has focused on morphosyntactic processes in Indo-European languages. This study investigated the neural correlates of temporal processing in Mandarin Chinese, a language that is not morphologically marked for tense. In a sentence acceptability judgment task, we manipulated the agreement between semantically enriched temporal adverbs or a highly grammaticalized aspectual particle (-guo) and temporal noun phrases. Disagreement of both the temporal adverbs and the aspectual particle elicited a centro-parietal P600 effect in event-related potentials (ERPs) whereas only disagreeing temporal adverbs evoked an additional broadly distributed N400 effect. Moreover, a sustained negativity effect was observed on both the words following the critical ones and the last words in sentences with temporal disagreement. These results reveal both commonalities and differences between Chinese and Indo-European languages in temporal agreement processing. In particular, we demonstrate that temporal reference in Chinese relies on both lexical semantics and morphosyntactic processes and that the level of grammaticalization of linguistic devices representing similar temporal information is reflected in differential ERP responses.

Seeing Chinese characters in action: an fMRI study of the perception of writing sequences.

The Chinese character is composed of a finite set of strokes whose order in writing follows consensual principles and is learnt through school education. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), this study investigates the neural activity associated with the perception of writing sequences by asking participants to observe stroke-by-stroke display of characters. Violations were introduced by reversing the writing order of two or three successive strokes. Compared with the correct sequences, both types of violation engendered more activation in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) while the two-stroke reversal elicited additional activation in the supplementary motor area and the three-stroke reversal elicited additional activation in the left fusiform area and the right inferior temporal gyrus. Compared with either type of incorrect sequences, the correct sequences elicited activation in the bilateral dorsal premotor areas and left superior parietal lobule. These findings suggest that a domain-general sequence processing network is implicated in the perception of Chinese character writing and that the left fusiform encodes not only the visual configuration but also the dynamic aspect of the writing script.

Perceiving the writing sequence of Chinese characters: an ERP investigation.

The neural dynamics in perceiving well-learned sequences and its modulation by task demand were investigated in this study in which participants were asked to observe stroke-by-stroke display of Chinese characters composed of two radicals while their brain activity was monitored with the event-related potential (ERP) technique. Experiment 1 used an accuracy judgment task that would draw participants' attention to the violation of the writing sequence whereas Experiment 2 required participants to judge the completion of the display and thus the more automatic aspects of sequence processing could be revealed. In Experiment 1, the within-radical boundary reversal produced bilateral posterior N2 enhancement and the cross-boundary reversal elicited a left N2 effect and right posterior N2 reduction on the critical stroke. Both types of reversal elicited P3 effects on the critical stroke and sustained negativity effects on the following stroke, with the size being larger for the cross-boundary reversal. In Experiment 2, in addition to the P3 effects, the within-boundary reversal elicited a left posterior N2 effect and the cross-boundary reversal elicited right posterior N2 reduction on the critical stroke. Moreover, on the following stroke, the cross-boundary reversal elicited a right N2 effect and both types of reversal elicited sustained positivity effects. These findings demonstrate that native Chinese readers use their sequential knowledge to predict upcoming strokes in perceiving the writing of characters and to construct appropriate representations for the action sequence regardless of whether such predictions and constructions are required by the task.