Even a rich man can afford that expensive house: ERP responses to construction-based pragmatic constraints during sentence comprehension
Even a rich man can afford that expensive house: ERP responses to construction-based pragmatic constraints during sentence comprehension
复制标题
即使是有钱人也买得起那昂贵的房子：ERP 对句子理解过程中基于构式的语用约束的响应
DOI：
10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2013.06.009
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发表时间：
2013-08-01
期刊：
影响因子：
2.6
通讯作者：
Zhou, Xiaolin
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Jiang, Xiaoming;Li, Yi;Zhou, Xiaolin
语言结构通常被视为对独立于组成词的含义的句法形式和语义信息的配对进行编码。在这里，通过事件相关电位（ERP），我们证明这种构造还可以编码立即影响在线句子理解和相关神经活动的语用约束（事件可能性）。中文中的“狮子……斗……”结构（甚至与英语相似）通常描述预期性较低的事件（语义限制）；它还引入了一个实用尺度，意味着任何比所描述的事件可能性更高的事件都一定会发生（实用推理）。通过在构造中嵌入一个高度可能的事件（一个富人买房子）或一个未指定的事件（一个人买房子），我们创建了一个不一致的条件和一个未指定的条件，并将这两个条件与描述了低预期事件（一个穷人买房子）的控制条件进行了比较。主要动词短语的 ERP 显示，在不一致和未指定条件下，N400 在右半球达到最大值，随后出现晚期负性，在前面出现最大值，前者的 N400 效应比后者更大。句子最后短语的 ERP 对不一致的情况显示出持续的否定性，但对未指定的条件则没有。 N400效应可能反映了将当前事件统一到连……斗……结构中的难度增加。后期的消极性可能反映了根据似然尺度的第二遍修订，以满足构造的实用约束。 (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. 保留所有权利。
A linguistic construction is typically viewed as encoding the pairing of syntactic form and semantic information that is independent of the meaning of constituent words. Here with the event-related potentials (ERPs) we demonstrate that such a construction can also encode pragmatic constraints (event likelihood) that immediately influence online sentence comprehension and the associated neural activity. The lion ... dou ... construction in Chinese (similar to even in English) normally describes an event of low expectedness (a semantic constraint); it also introduces a pragmatic scale implying that any event with a higher likelihood than the event described must occur (pragmatic inference). By embedding a highly likely event (a rich man buying a house) or an underspecified event (a man buying a house) in the construction, we created an incongruent condition and an underspecified condition and compared both with a control condition in which an event of low expectedness (a poor man buying a house) was described. ERPs on the main verb phrases showed an N400 with a maximum in the right hemisphere followed by a late negativity with an anterior maximum for both the incongruent and underspecified conditions, with a larger N400 effect for the former than for the latter. ERPs on the sentence-final phrases showed a sustained negativity for the incongruent, but not for the underspecified condition. The N400 effect may reflect the increased difficulty in unifying the current event into the lian ... dou ... construction. The late negativity may reflect a second-pass revision according to the likelihood scale to satisfy the pragmatic constraints of the construction. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.