Native and non-native parsing of adjective placement—an ERP study of Mandarin and English sentence processing

Abstract

The rules governing adjective-noun order vary crosslinguistically, and event-related potentials have shown that violations of these rules elicit biphasic responses in native speakers and advanced non-native learners. We built on prior findings by replicating an English experiment and running a new experiment in Mandarin. In the replication, we tested native English speakers with advanced Mandarin proficiency (n=20); for the Mandarin experiment, we tested the same English-Mandarin bilinguals along with Mandarin native speakers (n=32). Native speakers in both languages showed the expected biphasic effect. However, to our surprise, native speakers’ Mandarin results showed an additional effect at the first word of the correct adjective-noun order, and Mandarin non-native speakers showed only an early effect. To explore these results, we compared individual differences, showing that participants varied in response patterns. We interpret our results as demonstrating that even when languages share adjective placement rules, processing can be impacted by crosslinguistic differences.