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When "He" Can Also Be "She": An ERP Study of Reflexive Pronoun Resolution in Written Mandarin Chinese.

ABSTRACT: The gender information in written Chinese third person pronouns is not symmetrically encoded: the character for "he" (, with semantic radical , meaning human) is used as a default referring to every individual, while the character for "she" (, with semantic radical , meaning woman) indicates females only. This critical feature could result in different patterns of processing of gender information in text, but this is an issue that has seldom been addressed in psycholinguistics. In Chinese, the written forms of the reflexive pronouns are composed of a pronoun plus the reflexive "/self" (/himself and /herself). The present study focuses on how such gender specificity interacts with the gender type of an antecedent, whether definitional (proper name) or stereotypical (stereotypical role noun) during reflexive pronoun resolution. In this event-related potential (ERP) study, gender congruity between a reflexive pronoun and its antecedent was studied by manipulating the gender type of antecedents and the gender specificity of reflexive pronouns (default: /himself vs. specific: /herself). Results included a P200 "attention related" congruity effect for /himself and a P600 "integration difficulty" congruity effect for /herself. Reflexive pronoun specificity independently affected the P200 and N400 components. These results highlight the role of /himself as a default applicable to both genders and indicate that only the processing of /herself supports a two-stage model for anaphor resolution. While both reflexive pronouns are evaluated at the bonding stage, the processing of the gender-specific reflexive pronoun is completed in the resolution stage.

SUBMITTER: Su JJ

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4751802 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:We present three self-paced reading experiments that investigate the reflexive ziji "self" in Chinese-in particular, we tested whether and how person-feature-based blocking guides comprehenders' real-time processing and final interpretation of ziji. Prior work claims that in Chinese sentences like "John thought that {I/you/Bill} did not like ZIJI," (i) the reflexive ziji can refer to the matrix subject John if the intervening subject is also a third person entity (e.g., Bill), but that (ii) an intervening first or second person pronoun blocks reference to the matrix subject, causing ziji to refer to the first or second person pronoun. However, native speakers' judgments regarding the accessibility of long-distance antecedents are rather unstable, and researchers also disagree on what the exact configurations are that allow blocking. In addition, many open questions persist regarding the real-time processing of reflexives more generally, in particular regarding the accessibility (or lack thereof) of structurally unlicensed antecedents. We conducted three self-paced reading studies where we recorded people's word-by-word reading times and also asked questions that probed their off-line interpretation of the reflexive ziji. People's answers to the off-line questions show that blocking is not absolute: Comprehenders do allow significant numbers of non-local choices in both the first and the second person blocking conditions, albeit in small numbers. At the same time, the reading time data, particularly those from Experiments 2 and 3, show that comprehenders use person feature cues to quickly filter out inaccessible long-distance referents. The difference between on-line and off-line patterns points to the possibility that the interpretation of ziji unfolds over time: it seems that initially, during real-time processing, person-feature cues weigh more heavily and constrain what antecedent candidates get considered, but that at some later point, other kinds of information are also integrated and perhaps outweigh the person-feature constraint, resulting in consideration of referents that were initially "blocked" due to the person-feature constraint. In sum, in addition to the structural constraints identified in prior work, person-featural cues also play a key role in regulating the on-line processing of reflexives in Chinese.

Dataset Information

When "He" Can Also Be "She": An ERP Study of Reflexive Pronoun Resolution in Written Mandarin Chinese.

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