title: The interplay between referential processing and local syntactic/semantic processing: ERPs to written Chinese discourse.
abstract: Two event-related brain potential experiments were conducted to investigate the functional interplay between discourse-level referential processing and local syntactic/semantic processing of phrases. We manipulated both the syntactic/semantic coherence of a noun phrase (NP) and the referential ambiguity of the same NP. Incoherence of the NP elicited a P600 effect in both experiments. Referential ambiguities elicited a sustained negativity (Nref) in a subset of the participants in both experiments. Crucially, among participants showing robust Nref effects to referential ambiguity in the coherent condition, Nref effects were absent when the NP was incoherent. These results provide evidence against theories in which referential processing is functionally independent of local syntactic/semantic processing of phrases. Instead, a local phrase anomaly can block aspects of referential processing concerning ambiguity.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
authors.forename: Jing
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Yu
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China; Key Laboratory of Machine Perception (Ministry of Education), Peking University, Beijing 100871, China. Electronic address: yxzhang@pku.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Yaxu
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, 525 East University, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1109, United States.
authors.forename: Julie E
authors.initials: JE
authors.lastname: Boland
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
authors.forename: Lin
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Cai
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D002681:China; D032882:Comprehension; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005071:Evoked Potentials; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D011932:Reading; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Discourse context; Event-related brain potentials; Language comprehension; Phrase structure; Referential ambiguity; Semantic processing; Syntactic processing