Impressum Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, 2011 Diese Arbeit ist unter folgender Creative Commons-Lizenz lizenziert: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0 Druck: Sächsisches Druck- und Verlagshaus Direct World, Dresden ISBN 978-3-941504-13-4 The Influence of Animacy and Context on Word Order Processing: Neurophysiological Evidence from Mandarin Chinese Von der Philologischen Fakultät der Universität Leipzig genehmigte DISSERTATION Zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades doctor philosophiae Dr. Phil. vorgelegt von Luming Wang geboren am 16. Februar 1981 in Zhoushan, China Dekan: Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Lörscher Gutachter: Prof. Dr. Balthasar Bickel Prof. Dr. Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky Prof. Dr. Kaoru Horie For my mother tongue, one of the many languages in this world. Acknowledgements This thesis could not have been written without the support and friendship of many people. If life is like online sentence processing in the sense that one must make a decision even without being sure of where it will lead, those people are definitely “prominent” characters that have greatly influenced my decisions, especially when I was experiencing “ambiguities” during different periods. I would like to thank them in chronological order. I thank my parents for giving me the initial processing preference, which has driven me to become closer to those things and people that I like, but unexpectedly lead me farther from them. I thank them from the bottom of my heart for their continuing selfless love. I am lucky for having been a student of Prof. Kaoru Horie and Prashant Pardesh during my MA studies at Tohoku University in Japan. From their inspiring lectures and daily, interesting conversations, I first learned that there is a sub-discipline of linguistics called “typology”. Furthermore, I want to thank them for providing me with numerous opportunities while I was in Japan and for encouraging me to continue my studies in Germany. ! I am very thankful to Prof. Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky and Prof. Matthias Schlesewsky for giving me the chance to learn about ERP experiments at the Max- Planck-Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Science in Leipzig. In fact, they are associated with so many “first time” memories over the past years that I cannot list them all here. Special thanks go to Prof. Ina Bornkessel-Schelesewsky. Without her trust, insights, patience and financial support, I would not have been able to smoothly finish my PhD studies. I really appreciate the kindness of Prof. Balthasar Bickel who supervised my PhD studies. I benefitted a lot from the joint project called “Typological Variance in the Processing of Grammatical Relations” led by him and Prof. Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky. For the first time, I got to know “neurotypology” as a new field combined with typology and psychology. I am also deeply grateful to them for their criticism and suggestions in the early versions of this thesis, through which I was able to understand the significance of my work to linguistics. Unbelievably, it is they who showed me how wonderful my mother tongue is. Finally, I also want to thank my colleagues and friends whose existence reminded me that I was not alone but in a “group” while I was in Leipzig, Berlin and Marburg. I greatly appreciate the invaluable assistance of Katja Brüning, Isabel Plauth, Heike Böthel, Cornelia Schmidt and Kristiane Werrmann in the acquisition of the ERP data, and Kerstin Flake for modifying figures in my thesis. I thank Dietmar Roehm, !ükrü Barı" Demiral, Friderike Haupt and Susann Wolff for their technical help. I am grateful to Kamal Choudhary, R. Muralikrishnan, Alena Witzlack-Makarevich, Safiye Genç, Sabine Keller, Masahiko Nose, Bai Chen for their linguistic and non-linguistics support, which made my life in Germany easier and more enjoyable. Many thanks also go to Petra Schumacher, Hung Yu-Chen, Markus Philipp, Franziska Kretzschmar, Torsten Schenk, Wang Lin-Ran, Li Xu-Ping for their warm-heartedness from the first day of my life in Mainz. There are so many people, whether they know it or not, who contributed to shaping this thesis into its present form. Of course, I am the person who is solely responsible for any failings that may exist in this thesis. Abbreviations 1.SG, 2.SG, 3.SG first, second, third person singular ACC accusative ASP aspect CL classifier COM comment CPF completive focus CTF contrastive focus DAT dative DEF definite DT discourse topic EEG electroencephalography ERP event-related potencial FOC focus FT focus topic GR grammatical relation GRO ground GSR general semantic role INDEF indefinite LOC location LS logical structure MAS masculine NEU neuter NOM nominative PL plural POSS possesive PST past QP question particle RC relative clause TOP topic Contents Introduction I Theoretical and Empirical Background 1 Language Processing 3 1.1 Incrementality ..................................................................4 1.2 Word Order Variations .......................................................7 1.2.1 The Subject-preference ............................................9 1.2.2 Animacy ...............................................................18 1.2.3 Context ................................................................21 1.3 General Discussion ..........................................................24 2 The EEG and ERP Methodology 29 2.1 EEG ..............................................................................29 2.2 ERP ...............................................................................33 2.3 Language-Related Components .........................................35 2.3.1 LAN .....................................................................35 2.3.2 N400 ...................................................................38 2.3.3 P600 ....................................................................42 3 The eADM and Neurophysiological Evidences 49 3.1 The eADM ......................................................................49 3.2 The Effects of Word Order Variations..................................53 3.2.1 Subject-preference Effects ......................................53 3.2.2 Animacy Effects.....................................................59 3.2.3 Context Effects......................................................66 3.3 Challenges from Chinese ..................................................71 4 Mandarin Chinese 73 4.1 Topic and Subject............................................................74 4.2 Pro-drop ........................................................................79 4.3 Word Order Variation in Chinese........................................81 4.3.1 SVO .....................................................................83 4.3.2 S b! OV and O bèi SV .............................................90 4.3.3 SOV and OSV ........................................................92 4.4 Research Questions and Predictions ................................. 100 II Experiments 5 Subject Preference in Processing NP-V Constructions 107 5.1 Experiment 1: A comparison of OV vs. SV orders............... 107 5.1.1 Methods ............................................................. 111 5.1.2 Results............................................................... 116 5.1.3 Relatedness Questionnaire Study ........................... 122 5.1.4 Discussion .......................................................... 123 5.2 Experiment 2: A comparison of OV vs. SV orders without differences in lexical-semantic relatedness between the preverbal NP and V across conditions............................................... 125 5.2.1 Relatedness Pre-test ............................................ 126 5.2.2 Methods ............................................................. 128 5.2.3 Results............................................................... 129 5.2.4 Discussion .......................................................... 135 5.3 Experiment 3: A comparison of OV vs. SV orders in which the initial NP is either topicalised or not topicalised by the context.. 143 5.3.1 Methods ............................................................. 147 5.3.2 Results............................................................... 151 5.3.3 Discussion .......................................................... 157 5.4 Summary of Experiments 1-3 ......................................... 162 6 Animacy in Processing NP1-NP2-V Constructions 165 6.1 Experiment 4: A comparison of SOV vs. OSV orders........... 165 6.1.1 Materials and Methods.......................................... 169 6.1.2 Results............................................................... 172 6.1.3 Discussion .......................................................... 175 III Summary and Discussion 7 General Discussion 185 7.1 Summary ..................................................................... 186 7.2 Implications.................................................................. 191 7.2.1 The Subject-Preference (Exp. 1-3) ......................... 191 7.2.2 The Influence of Animacy (Exp. 4) ......................... 194 7.2.3 The Influence of Context (Exp. 3) .......................... 199 7.3 Outlook ....................................................................... 203 7.4 Conclusion ................................................................... 204 References 207 List of Figures List of Tables Appendix 1 Appendix 2 Introduction Language comprises a dynamic set of visual, auditory, or tactile symbols of communication, which is considered to be exclusive