Expressions with Aspectual Verbs Elicit Slower Reading Times than Those with Psychological Verbs: An Eye-Tracking Study in Mandarin Chinese

A self-paced reading study of context effects in the processing of aspectual verbs in Mandarin

“…In (4a), kaishi ('begin') is followed by an entity zhe ben xiaoshuo ('the novel') and it gives rise to an ungrammatical sentence. Similar observations were reported in the literature that some aspectual verb does not always allow entity-complements in simple declarative sentences in Mandarin (Lin & Liu, 2005;Ma et al, 2022) To render the sentence acceptable, the event needs to be fully explicit, as in (4b). However, it happens that if the sentence structure is changed to (5), kaishi ('begin') does allow an entity-denoting complement.…”

“…Lai et al (2017) found significant longer reading times for the aspectual verb condition compared with the psych verb condition and the control condition at the two Regions of Interest (ROIs) following the complement in the self-paced reading study, as well as significant activations for the aspectual verb condition over the psych verb condition and the control condition in the fMRI study. In addition, cross-linguistic evidence supporting the SIH was found in an eye-tracking study on verb class in Mandarin (Ma et al, 2022). Processing costs were found in sentences with aspectual verbs compared with sentences with psychological verbs and control verbs at the verb, the complement, and a post-complement region comprising four Chinese characters following the complement.…”

“…Based on Ma et al (2022), in which effects related to aspectual verbs were found in Mandarin Chinese and provided partial support for the SIH, the present study investigated whether context played a role in processing sentences with aspectual verbs in Mandarin. The grammatical contexts were created by using predicational adverbs, since adverbs with different properties can either reduce the dimension space to a single dimension or not, and therefore could either facilitate processing or not.…”

“…Following the procedure that was used in three studies in the field carried out by McElree et al (2001), Baggio et al (2010), and Ma et al (2022), synonyms and nearsynonyms among the responses of each sentence were first conflated (Baggio et al, 2010;Ma et al, 2022). And then, 59 verbs were selected because the dominant response occurred more than twice as often as the next most frequent response (McElree et al, 2001;Traxler et al, 2002).…”

“…They were asked to fill in the blank with a classifier and an NP, as in SHI John LAI finish ___(for classifier) ___(for NP) with a perfect ending. The reason why the classifier after the determiner was also kept blank was that, in Mandarin, NPs require particular classifiers, so the presence of a classifier will provide a clue as to what the upcoming word might be (Ma et al, 2022). The mean cloze probabilities were 0.53 (NoAdv-Asp), 0.65 (NoAdv control), 0.54 (MA-Asp), 0.53 (MA control), 0.51 (SO-Asp), and 0.65 (SO control).…”