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Syntactic and Semantic Processing of Chinese Long Passive Bei Sentences:

Evidence from Event-related Potentials

Li Xiayan, Zeng Tao

(Changsha, Hunan, 410000)

Abstract: Scalp-recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) are known to be sensitive to particular

aspects of sentence processing. The N400 component is widely recognized as an effect closely related

with lexical-semantic processing. The absence of an N400 effect in participants performing tasks in

Indo-European languages has been taken as evidence that failed syntactic category processing appears

to block lexical-semantic integration, and that syntactic structure building is a prerequisite of semantic

analysis. An event-related potential experiment was designed in order to investigate whether such

syntactic primacy can be said equally to apply to Chinese sentence processing. In the paper, Chinese

long passive sentences are involved. Besides correct long passive sentences, sentences with either

single semantic or single syntactic violation, as well as double syntactic and semantic anomaly were

used in the present research. Results showed that both purely semantic and combined violation evoked

a broad negativity in the time window 300-500ms, indicating the independence of lexical-semantic

integration. These findings provided solid evidence that lexical-semantic parsing plays a crucial role in

Chinese sentence comprehension.

Keywords: Syntactic and Semantic Processing; Chinese Long Passive Sentences; ERP


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Introduction

Language is a set of symbols unique to human beings. And language activity mainly involves input

and output processes. As to psychological process of language input, many information levels are

concluded in, such as specific textual, sentence and vocabulary level. The question of whether

syntactic or semantic processing dominates in sentence processing is a controversial one. In

consideration of these issues, several processing models have been proposed and caused a lot of

controversy. Among them, the syntax-first or serial model (Ferreira & Clifton, 1986; Frazier, 1987; Frazier

& Fodor,1978; Frazier & Rayner, 1982; Friederici, 2002) assumes that syntactic analysis is autonomous

and prior to semantic processing; and the semantic integration always depends on the syntactic

structure built by the modular parser. On the contrary, the constraint-satisfaction model (Bates &

MacWhinney, 1987; MacDonald et al., 1994; Marslen-Wislon & Tyler, 1980) claims that semantic and

syntactic processing is separately independent, but they interact at the early phase of sentence

comprehension. In addition, the concurrent model proposes that syntactic and semantic analyses are

not separately independent; instead they interplay with each other during the whole process of sentence

comprehension (Boland, 1997).

To thoroughly and fully explain human’s sentence processing mechanism, the scalp-recorded

event-related potentials (ERPs) in psychological mechanism of sentence processing were widely used.

Since 1990s, psycholinguists have begun to combine semantic and syntactic anomaly in a same

sentence. By observing the integration process of semantic and syntactic information, researchers could

make a better understanding towards the dynamic language processing. For the first time, Kutas and

Hillyard (1980) found that the semantically inappropriate words (e.g. I take my coffee with cream and

dog) generated a negative-going wave peaking around 400ms, which was lately named N400 and

believed to be related with semantic integration during sentence processing. Later

researches (Brown & Hagoort, 1993; Chwilla et al., 1995; Friederici, 2002) further demonstrated that

N400 was evoked potential of lexical-semantic integration processing. On the other hand, Osterhout and

Holcomb (1993) examined a construction that is grammatically well-formed but simply difficult to process,

that is, “garden-path” sentences (e.g. “The women persuaded to open the door”), and they observed a

late positive going wave with a peak value at 600ms after the onset of the critical word. Besides, this late

positivity P600 was also detected in Dutch following by a violation of agreement in grammatical gender

(Hagoort & Brown, 1999).

The ERP has become a powerful tool to explore the relationship between syntax and semantics

processing, and to examine whether there is a syntactic primacy over semantics, largely due to the

occurrence of N400. However, lots of ERP studies observed no such N400 effect in the combined

syntactic and semantic anomaly regardless of the presentation paradigm (visual: Friederici et al., 1999;

auditory: Friederici et al., 2004; Hahne & Friederici, 2002; Isel et al., 2007). For example, Friederici et al.

(1999) performed a study in German by using visual presentation paradigm, participants were asked to

read different types of sentences whose terminal verb was either congruent with the preceding context

or incongruent due to a phrase structure violation, a semantic violation, or both. Results showed that

only the single semantic anomaly evoked a large N400, but for the combined violation, no such N400

was found. Later, Hahne and Friererici (2002) employed the auditory paradigm and performed two

experiments to verify the time-course of semantic and syntactic processing as well as their possible

functional primacy in German. N400 component was revealed in the semantic violation, while an early

anterior negativity and P600 was revoked because of the syntactic anomaly. However, for sentences

with both semantic and syntactic violation, only Elan and P600 were detected but no N400 either.

As what mentioned above, most ERP data of sentence processing were from Indo-European

languages, such as English, German, French, etc., and very often the syntactic category primacy was

supported (Friederici et al., 1999, 2004; Hahne & Friederici,2002; Isel et al., 2007). This stimulated

scholars to explore whether such syntactic primacy is also universal in non-Indo-European languages,

such as Chinese. As a matter of fact, several researches have already been conducted in this

non-inflectional language (Ye et al ., 2006; Yu & Zhang, 2008; Zhang et al ., 2010, 2013).

For instance, Ye et al. (2006) carried out an experiment to testify the semantic and syntactic

processing as well as their interaction in Chinese “Ba” construction. They employed the auditory

paradigm, by which correct, semantically or syntactically violated as well as double violated sentences

were presented to participants.


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Observations revealed an early starting N400 effect in the semantic anomaly (e.g.伐木工开采森林，

把松树裁了 “Exploiting the forest, the timberjack cut pine trees”), while an early starting anterior

negativity and a temporally limited centro-parietal negativity in the syntactic violation (e.g. 设计师制作新

衣，把裁了 “To make new dresses, the stylist cut”). However, for the combined anomaly (e.g. 伐木工开

采森林，把裁了 “Exploiting the forest, the timberjack cut”), it evoked similar components as in the

syntactic violation. No P600 was found neither for the syntactic violation or combined violation. These

findings implied that in Chinese comprehension, syntactic processing appears earlier than semantic

integration, and they are independent from each other in an early time window, but interact in later

period. However, it was noted that their stimuli design was not that perfect, since they ignored the

position effect of the critical words, which could easily lead to the wrap-up response effects.

Later on, Yu and Zhang (2008) also investigated the Chinese “Ba” structure, but they employed the

visual presentation paradigm and overall correctness judgment task. In their study, they improved the

material design by adding frequency words, and thus avoiding the wrap-up response effects. By

comparing sentences involving combined syntactic and semantic violation (e.g. 清洁工把大厦的窗户全

部糖了一遍 “The dustman sugar all the windows of the edifice once”) with correct sentences (e.g. 清洁

工把大厦的窗户全部擦了一遍 “The dustman wiped all the windows of the edifice once”), an N400

component was detected for the combined anomaly, indicating that semantic processing can proceed

even when syntactic category processing fails. In other words, there was no syntactic primacy over

semantics in Chinese processing, which was different from the findings in Indo-European languages.

Nevertheless, in their experiment, no single syntactic violation was covered.

In order to further verify whether this functional primacy exists or not in Chinese comprehension,

Zhang and Yu (2010) performed another two brain potential experiments, in which “Ba” (e.g. 李薇把新鲜

的鸭梨慢慢地削了两个 “Wei Li peeled two fresh pears slowly”) and SVO structure (e.g. 女孩买了裙子和

手套 “The girl bought a skirt and gloves”) were examined respectively. This study overcame previous

drawbacks in stimuli design and exactly detected the N400 effect in the combined anomaly, which

became a strong evidence for the claim that no such syntactic primacy was found in Chinese. Put it

another way, semantic interpretation proceeded despite the impossibility of a well-formed syntactic

structure, and semantics does not need a processing license from syntax in the comprehension of

Chinese. Very recently, Chinese OSV construction such as 房地产这家集团最近几年开发了三处 “This

corporation has developed its real estate business in three places during recent several years”) was

investigated by Zhang et al.(2013). Similar N400 component was detected in the syntactic category plus

semantic anomaly and transitivity plus semantic anomaly within 300-500ms, which further demonstrated

that semantic integration was able to proceed despite of the syntactic structure incongruity.

With an overview of the previous studies, it was not difficult to find that these ERP research in

Chinese mainly focused on the “Ba” construction, SVO and OSV structures. However, experiments

involving other sentence patterns, such as long passive construction were scarce.

To sum up, inspired by the Chinese ERP research (Yu and Zhang, 2008; Zhang et al.,

2010, 2013), the present study collected simple Chinese long passive sentences with three

different complements as the research object, and it could not only control the critical words

in the middle part of the sentences, but also ensure the concise basic-constructed sentences

without complex meaning disturbance. The current study will investigate the online processing of

Chinese long passives by controlling these variables and further explore which one enjoys the

dominance, syntactic processing or semantic processing in the comprehension of long Chinese

passives. Supposing that syntactic category primacy did exist in the comprehension of Chinese long passives,

then, no N400 effect would be present for cases the double syntactic and semantic incongruity.

Method

Participants

Eighteen right-handed undergraduate and postgraduate students (9 males and 9 females) from Hunan

University took part in this experiment (mean age: 23 years old, range: 22-25 years old, standard deviation: 1.85).

All participants were native speakers of Mandarin Chinese, having normal or corrected-to-normal vision, without

neurological history


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Materials

In this study, Chinese long passive sentences are selected as the stimuli. All the stimuli are

designed to be simple and short enough in order to ensure that the participants could make a rapid

response after they see the sentences presented on the screen. 140 long passive sentences are divided

into 30 groups, excepting 20 long passives as disturbed sentences. Each group covers four different

types of sentences: control normal sentences with three different kinds of complements, target

sentences with single semantically violated passives, single syntactically anomalous sentences, and

double violated long passive sentences (Table 1). However, in order to make the evoked wave-forms in

the ERP data much smoother, these 40 items are circulated for 3 times, and as a result, each participant

will read 140 Chinese long passive sentences. All materials, with an average length of 13.8 words are

attached in the appendix, which is available from the readers upon request.

Furthermore, in order to avoid participants predict the patterns of the incongruity, twenty filter

long passive sentences are added and all material sentences are presented randomly by E-prime

software.

Table 1 Sentence Types and Corresponding Examples (the Critical Words are in Italic)

Sentence Types Examples

Normal Sentences Correct Verbs

*Shuodadedangao Beimeimei Chiguangle.

*The big cake was eaten up by my sisiter.

*硕大的蛋糕被妹妹奖励了

Sentences with Single Semantic Violation

*Shuodadedangao Beimeimei Jianglile

*The big cake was praised by my sister.

*硕大的蛋糕被妹妹把吃光了。

Sentences with Single Syntactic Violation

*ShuodadedangaoBeimeimei Bachiguangle.

*The big cake was sister eaten up.

*硕大的蛋糕被妹妹玩具了。

Sentences with Combined Violation *Shuodadedangao beimeimie wanjule.

*The big cake was toy by my sister

Procedures

During the formal experiment, each subject sat in a comfortable and fixed chair approximately

60–70cm in front of a computer screen, and then they were asked to judge the acceptability of

sentences appearing on the screen which were correct, semantically or syntactically violated, or double

violated as quickly and accurately as possible. An instant button-press on “A” or “D” in the keyboard was

anticipated. “A” represented that a specific passive sentence was acceptable, while “D” stood for

unacceptable.

All sentence materials were presented on a computer monitor running the E-Prime 2.0 software

package. Each sentence was divided into three parts and presented parts by parts (a part includes one

or more phrases) in the center of a high resolution computer screen. In the presentation phase: initially,

appeared the instruction, which offered the subjects a brief introduction of the experiment requirements.

Once understanding it, participants pressed the any key in the keyboard to activate the test. Immediately,

a 250ms blank appeared on the screen. Followed by was the first part of sentences (the grammatical

subject) lasting for 700ms. Then the second part, namely the critical stimulus, which lasted for 1000m s

was presented. After that, a fixation “+” for 500ms appeared in order to catch the subjects’ attention and

warn them to press “D” or “A” instantly when the next part turned up. Finally, the last part, verb with

complement of sentences was presented for 1000ms. Just in this part, participants should give an

immediate judgment whether this sentence was acceptable or not.

Event-related potential recording and data analysis

Continuous EEGs were recorded over the scalp by using an Electro cap with 64 tin electrodes. The

raw EEG recordings were amplified with Synamps2 RT bio-electric amplifiers, and then acquired online


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by using Curry7 XS software, which final off-line analysis was conducted. Each electrode referred to the

left mastoid, and both the horizontal and vertical electrooculogram were recorded. Impedance of all

channels was kept below 5KΩ. The collected EEGs data were recomputed against the average

reference, with 200 milliseconds pre-stimulus serving as baseline, and those trials covering

eye-movement, eye blinks, or bad blocks were removed from the final analysis. Prior to the off-line

averaging, waveforms of each trial were screened orderly for baseline correction, artifact reduction and

bad blocks removing. Subsequent analyses were based on 1000ms epochs, ranging from 200ms before

the onset of the critical words (the middle verbs) to 800ms after them. Based on the visual inspection

and previous studies, two time windows were selected: 300-500ms and 550-800ms. The former covers

N400 effect, while the latter covers P600. Statistical analyses were mainly conducted on the amplitudes

for each participant in these two time windows. ERPs were analyzed separately for midline and lateral

electrodes. For midline electrodes, the amplitude values were entered into an omnibus ANOVAs, with

electrode (FZ, CZ, PZ) and sentence type as within-subject factors. For lateral electrodes, three

within-subject variables were involved in the omnibus ANOVAs: hemisphere (left, right), region (anterior,

central, posterior), and sentence type (5 levels). Six regions of interest were generated crossing the

factors of hemisphere and region, besides, for each region of interest, there were six electrodes: left

anterior (F3, F5, F7, FC3, FC5, FT7), left central (C3, C5, T7, CP3, CP5, TP7), left posterior (P3, P5, P7,

PO3, PO7, O1), right anterior (F4, F6, F8, FC4, FC6, FT8), right central (C4, C6, T8, CP4, CP6, TP8),

and right posterior (P4, P6, P8, PO4, PO8, O2).

Results

Average accuracy was high for each condition in the behavior data: 98.53% for the correct condition

(standard deviation: 0.023), 97.72% for the single semantic violation (standard deviation: 0.021), 98.19%

for the purely syntactic anomaly (standard deviation: 0.019), and 98.96% for the double violation

(standard deviation: 0.022). This indicated that participants could correctly comprehend and judge the

material sentences.

Figure 1 shows the grand average ERPs elicited by the four types of sentences on representative

electrodes at midline (FZ, CZ, PZ) and lateral sites (F5, C5, P5, F6, C6, P6). As shown in these figures,

besides the single semantic violation, the combined syntactic and semantic anomaly elicited a larger

negativity with a wide distribution in the classic N400 time window (300-500ms), which was similar to the

findings in the study of Zhang et al. (2010, 2013). Following the N400 effect, the purely syntactic

violation and combined syntactic and semantic anomaly generated a centro-parietal positivity during

550-800ms. ANOVA tests were conducted on the amplitudes in these two time windows. The overall

ANOVA results for midline and lateral electrodes in 300-500ms and 550-800ms are presented below.

Time Window 300-500ms The overall ANOVAs for N400 at the midline and lateral electrodes in

this time window revealed a sentence type effect (p<.05) at both sites. Separate analyses limited to

each electrode at midline sites all exhibited a significant sentence type effect (FZ: F (4, 60) =56.93,

p<.05, CZ: F (4, 60) = 91.229, p<.05, PZ: F (4, 60) = 124.658, p<.05). For the lateral electrodes,

statistical analyses displayed that not only a sentence type effect, but also a region and hemisphere

effect, as well as an interaction of sentence type with hemisphere (p<.05) was observed. However, no

interaction effect was found between sentence type and region. And there was no interaction effect in

the three-way ANOVA test of type (5) x region (3) x hemisphere (2). Both at the midline and lateral

electrodes, double violated sentences enjoyed the highest negativity, followed by the semantically

anomalous condition and the correct sentences. One-way ANOVA analysis for N400 amplitude between

the single semantic and combined violation at both electrodes revealed a significant 8 difference

(midline, F=45.335, p=.028<.05; lateral, F=86.52, p=.019<.05). Most importantly, one-way ANOVA

analysis limited to each region demonstrated a sentence type effect for each one (anterior: F (4, 60)

=151.17, p<.05; central: F (4, 60) =173.73, p<.05; posterior: F (4, 60) =197.10, p<.05). And statistical

analysis revealed that the posterior region enjoyed the most negative N400 amplitude (p<.05).

Time window 550ms-800ms Results showed that the amplitude of syntactically anomalous

condition was more positive than the double anomalous sentences no matter at the midline or lateral

electrodes, but no significant difference was verified between these two conditions (midline, F=2.656,


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p=.118>.05; lateral, F=1.582, p=.140>.05). Separate analyses limited to each midline electrode revealed

a sentence type effect only at the centro-parietal region (FZ: F (4, 60) =1.279, p=.277>.05, CZ: F (4, 60)

=14.464,p=.00<.05, PZ: F (4, 60) =7.849, p=.00<.05). This indicated that the P600 effect was much

more salient in the central and posterior regions.

Discussion

The present research was intended to explore whether there was a syntactic primacy over semantic

parsing in the comprehension of Chinese long passive sentences. the present study added further

validation to the significance of semantic integration in the processing of Chinese sentences, and it

provided more evidence to the dominance of semantic processing in Chinese sentence comprehension,

which was a precise supplement to previous studies (Yu & Zhang, 2008; Zhang et al.,2010, 2013):

semantic integration could be conducted regardless of the impossibility of syntactic structure parsing.

This may due to the specific syntactic properties of Chinese, which lack morphological changes. As a

non-inflectional language, it is distinctly different from Indo-European languages in grammar and

morphology. For instance, the syntactic category of a word can be exactly distinguished by its

morphological forms or grammatical structures in Indo-European languages. However, in Chinese, no

such syntactic morphology could be utilized. To some degree, the lack of grammatical morphology

affects the Chinese sentence processing (Li et al., 1993,2004) and leads to the conjecture that

as a paratactic language, it is semantic integration that plays a vital role in the processing of

Chinese sentences (Li, 1996; Ye et al., 2006; Zhang et al., 2010, 2013).

At the same time, in the research of children language acquisition, among the three types of

complementary passive structure, children involved in the experiment acquires passive sentences of

three types of complement in different ages (Liu, 2009). Children acquire passive sentences of result

complement earlier than the other two types. As the subjects in the experiment spent different time in

passive sentence of different complement processing, children’s acquisition plays a role in adults’

sentence processing.

In summary, differently from previous studies on Indo-European languages, which supported the

functional primacy of syntactic structure building over semantic processing (Friederici, Steinhauer, &

Frisch, 1999; Friederici et al., 2004; Hahne & Friederici, 2002; Isel et al., 2007), the present study

reported an N400 component in the combined anomaly, indicating that there is no syntactic primacy in

Chinese middle processing. This finding added further validation to the significance of semantic

integration in the processing of Chinese sentences, and provided more solid evidence to the dominance

of semantic processing in Chinese sentence comprehension (Yu & Zhang, 2008; Zhang et al., 2010,

2013). That is, semantic integration could be conducted regardless of the impossibility of syntactic

structure parsing. Moreover, the results of our study suggest that Chinese and English are probably

processed in different regions of the speech zone. Although the data from the current study do not shed

light on this hypothesis, if we could confirm it in fMRI studies, it might be 10 possible to apply our

findings in the treatment of aphasia. Namely, if these two languages are indeed processed in different

brain areas, then it is reasonable to infer that clinicians should adopt distinct therapies when dealing with

aphasics in different languages. Although syntactic processing has a much stronger influence on

semantic integration in the comprehension of long Chinese passive sentences, the vital role of semantic

processing could never be ignored in terms of the induction of N400 effect in the combined violation. To

be exact, functional syntactic primacy is not necessarily suitable for the processing of a typical

non-inflectional language, namely, Chinese. This is mainly due to the specific characteristics of Chinese,

which is a paratactic language with no morphological inflections, relying on the lexical meanings or

logical associations of contexts to comprehend sentences. As a result, it tends to conjecture that in

Chinese sentence comprehension, the lexical-semantic integration is much more dominant than the

syntactic structure parsing.

Conclusion

The present study took a detailed research in exploring how Mandarin-speaking adults understand

and process long passive sentences in Chinese. Based on the major observations, in the processing of

Chinese long passive construction, semantic integration enjoyed a dominant role. Firstly, to better


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understand non-Indo language such as Chinese, much attention should be paid to the

lexical-semantic information of words, phrases, and sentences. But at the same time, great

importance should also be attached to sentence grammar when teaching Chinese long

passive construction or any other sentence structure. Because Chinese as a parataxis language

owns flexible and various sentence structure which requires students to read and acquire as many as

they could to master them. Secondly, in the further study, the neuro-psychological ERPs techniques and

psychological E-prime software were recommended to employ simultaneously, so as to make the

experimental results much more accurate and reliable. Thirdly, since the children acquisition sequence

plays an important role in adults, it provides us the vision that we have inherent advantages in using the

language that have been acquired early, at the same time, we should practice more and make lots of

effort in the words and sentences type that we acquired later since childhood to use them more

smoothly and fluently. To some degree, it provides evidence and direction for teachers to better arrange

their teaching.


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Appendix:


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Figure 1 Grand Average ERPs for Three Types of Sentences on Representative Electrodes at the

Midline Sites (F5, C5, P5, F6, C6, P6, FZ, CZ, and PZ). Negative amplitudes are plotted upward

Type 1: Correct Long Passive Sentences

Type 2: Sentences with Single Semantic Violation

Type 3: Sentences with Single Syntactic Violation

Type 4: Sentences with Combined Violation

Syntactic and Semantic Processing of Chinese Long … · Evidence from Event-related Potentials ... and that syntactic structure building is a prerequisite of semantic ... Each group

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