Acta Psychologica Sinica

Abstract

Sentence comprehension is a much-studied topic in modern cognitive psychology. It is very important to understand the psycholinguistic mechanisms underlying sentence comprehension in Chinese, a language without inflections. Because the lexical information of verb from a “Main Frame” of a sentence, more recent English studies are concerned more with the immediate effect of verb information in sentence comprehension, but such study in Chinese is scarce. Many English studies found that verb information such as verb selectional restrictions, argument structures, etc. emit an immediate effect on certain response tasks while reading or listening to sentences. These studies led to setting up the Lexical Driven Model of sentence comprehension. In the present study, the relationship of Chinese transitive verbs and the nouns/adjectives just following verbs was manipulated to form continuity/uncontinuity sentences, in order to study the immediate effect of Chinese verb lexical information, such as selectional restrictions, during the process of Chinese sentence comprehension. Cross-modal repetition priming lexical decision paradigm and eye tracking technology were used in two experiments. In the first experiment, a significant longer response time to target noun was found due to the mismatch of verb and noun. For verb-adjective sentences, different continuity also led to significant different response time to target adjectives. In the second experiment, obviously continuity effect was found in both noun and adjective cases. All the results showed that lexical information such as verb selectional restrictions attend Chinese sentence processing as soon as activated and accessed, instead of using category information only at the very beginning, thus supporting the Lexical Driven Model. The present study proved that the integration of Chinese is carried out during reading or listening in incremental fashion. When difficulties or exceptions are encountered, all sorts of available information including lexical information were used to make a transient decision without disrupting Chinese sentence processing. The present study also showed that the modality of immediate effect that Chinese verb information issue is influenced to some extent by the sentence presentation method and experiment task.

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