An elephant needs a head but a horse does not: An ERP study of classifier-noun agreement in Mandarin

研究成果: 雜誌貢獻期刊論文同行評審

7 引文 斯高帕斯(Scopus)

摘要

Classifiers are essential elements between numerals and nouns in Mandarin (e.g. “one-touCL-elephant”), but whether they serve a semantic or functional/morphosyntactic role in relation to the accompanying noun has been heatedly debated in linguistics. Previous ERP research consistently supported the semantic view with findings of N400; however, the apparent meaning clash in mismatched classifier-noun pairing in these studies might render morphosyntactic processing undetected. We created two violation conditions to explore classifier-noun agreement: incongruent GE-noun combinations (replacing a specific classifier with the meaning-devoid general classifier, GE) and outright grammatical mistakes (missing a required classifier). With congruent combinations as the baseline, GE-noun combinations elicited a negativity effect strikingly similar to that induced by the grammatical violation condition in phrases (Experiment 1) and sentences (Experiment 2), indicating the involvement of morphosyntactic processing in classifier-noun agreement. The finding suggests that there is a middle ground for the linguistic debate over the nature of classifier selection in relation to nouns.

原文英語
文章編號100852
期刊Journal of Neurolinguistics
52
DOIs
出版狀態已發佈 - 2019 11月

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • 實驗與認知心理學
  • 藝術與人文(雜項)
  • 語言和語言學
  • 認知神經科學

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