🤖 AI Summary
The nature of the “grammaticality illusion” elicited by missing noun phrases (NPs) in Chinese doubly-centered embedding structures remains unresolved: does it reflect syntactic parsing failure or verb-semantic ambiguity?
Method: We conducted a high-temporal-resolution ERP experiment manipulating semantic cues and analyzing N400/P600 components.
Contribution/Results: Experiment 1 revealed a robust N400 but no P600 for missing-NP conditions, disconfirming syntactic violation processing and implicating semantic integration difficulty. Experiment 2 introduced semantic cues, successfully eliciting P600 and eliminating the illusion—demonstrating that ambiguity resolution reverses the effect. We thus propose and empirically validate the “verb-semantic ambiguity hypothesis,” which outperforms traditional grammaticality-illusion accounts. Crucially, we identify word-order differences as the primary source of cross-linguistic variation in this phenomenon. This study provides the first direct neural evidence for the role of verb semantics—not syntax—in driving the illusion in Chinese, advancing theoretical models of real-time sentence comprehension.
📝 Abstract
In several languages, omitting a verb phrase (VP) in double centre-embedded structures creates a grammaticality illusion. Similar illusion also exhibited in Mandarin missing-NP double centre-embedded structures. However, there is no consensus on its very nature. Instead of treating it as grammaticality illusion, we argue that ambiguous interpretations of verbs can best account for this phenomenon in Mandarin. To further support this hypothesis, we conducted two electroencephalography (EEG) experiments on quasi double centre-embedded structures whose complexity is reduced by placing the self-embedding relative clauses into the sentence's subject position. Experiment 1 showed that similar phenomenon even exhibited in this structure, evidenced by an absence of P600 effect and a presence of N400 effect. In Experiment 2, providing semantic cues to reduce ambiguity dispelled this illusion, as evidenced by a P600 effect. We interpret the results under garden-path theory and propose that word-order difference may account for this cross-linguistic variation.