McLendon, J. | bioRxiv Science

bioRxiv2024

Rapid Parallel Visual Presentation Provides a New Perspective on Relative Clause Processing in Mandarin Chinese

A fundamental question in language processing research is the degree to which the acceptability and ease of interpretation of a sentence are affected by the moment-by-moment memory encoding and retrieval processes needed to process it in time, vs. the properties of the linguistic representation itself, such as syntactic complexity. This manuscript investigates relative clauses, a crucial testing ground for theories of language processing, using parallel presentation, a technique in which the key elements of the target syntactic dependency are displayed to the visual system at the same time. Compared to serial presentation, parallel presentation mitigates the extent to which complex memory operations must be deployed to process the structure word-by-word. We report on an electroencephalography (EEG) experiment in Mandarin Chinese. Participants were presented with sentences which contained either a subject- or object-modifying subject- or object-extracted relative clause. Sentence presentation was split across two separate screens, with each screen being displayed only for 166ms on average. We find a behavioral preference for subject-extracted relative clauses and distinct EEG signatures for subject- and object-extracted relative clauses. Together, these results - on account of the parallel presentation scheme applied here - provide support for the independent contribution of linguistic representation in processing difficulty and the perspective that relative clause processing involves more than the factors that word by word accounts of this phenomenon would suggest. Further, the EEG result contributes to a growing body of electrophysiology literature attempting to illuminate the processing mechanisms deployed in the context of parallel presentation.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2024

Quick, Don't Move!: Wh-Movement and Wh-In-Situ Structures in Rapid Parallel Reading - EEG studies in English, Urdu, and Mandarin Chinese

A fundamental question in the cognitive neuroscience of language is how grammatical representations are reflected in the organization and activity of the brain. This is challenging in part because superficial differences between languages, e.g., word order, exert different demands on the memory systems that process these structures. Here, we present an electroencephalography (EEG) study to investigate the brains responses to wh-constructions in English, Urdu, and Mandarin Chinese. In addition to the different word orders, writing systems, and morphological typologies of the 3 languages, these languages diverge with regard to how wh-constructions are formed: English requires filler-gap dependencies for wh-objects, whereas Urdu and Mandarin Chinese do not. We use a rapid parallel reading task, in which short sentences are displayed in parallel for 200ms to mitigate the different demands placed on memory systems. We show that neural responses distinguish wh-object constructions from their controls in midline anterior (Urdu, Mandarin Chinese) and right posterior sensors (English, Mandarin Chinese), from 200-400ms (English, Mandarin Chinese) and 500-800ms (English, Urdu). Although there is no detectable uniform, language-invariant response to wh-constructions across languages, there are a number of shared features in the evoked response between any pair of languages, i.e., wh-in-situ constructions generate an evoked response in midline anterior sensors. Moreover, behavioral evidence shows a robust cross-language cost of processing wh-object constructions, regardless of their surface form. This demonstrates that readers of diverse languages can process some grammatical information in a short 200ms fixation, and that the RPVP methodology may enable new ways of linking cognitive neuroscience of language to comparative syntax, i.e., the systematic description of similarities and differences between grammatical structures.

neuroscience↗