Grammaticality illusion or ambiguous interpretation? Event-related potentials reveal the nature of the missing-NP effect in Mandarin centre-embedded structures
This addresses a linguistic processing problem for cognitive scientists, offering incremental insights into cross-linguistic variations in sentence comprehension.
The study investigated whether the missing-NP effect in Mandarin center-embedded structures is a grammaticality illusion or due to ambiguous verb interpretations, finding through EEG experiments that semantic cues reduce the illusion, supporting the ambiguous interpretation hypothesis.
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.