Quick, Don’t Move!: Wh-Movement and Wh-In-Situ Structures in Rapid Parallel Reading – EEG studies in English, Urdu, and Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

A fundamental question in the cognitive neuroscience of language is how grammatical representations are reflected in the organization and activity of the brain. This is challenging in part because superficial differences between languages, e.g., word order, exert different demands on the memory systems that process these structures. Here, we present an electroencephalography (EEG) study to investigate the brain's responses to wh-constructions in English, Urdu, and Mandarin Chinese. In addition to the different word orders, writing systems, and morphological typologies of the 3 languages, these languages diverge with regard to how wh-constructions are formed: English requires filler-gap dependencies for wh-objects, whereas Urdu and Mandarin Chinese do not. We use a rapid parallel reading task, in which short sentences are displayed in parallel for 200ms to mitigate the different demands placed on memory systems. We show that neural responses distinguish wh-object constructions from their controls in midline anterior (Urdu, Mandarin Chinese) and right posterior sensors (English, Mandarin Chinese), from 200-400ms (English, Mandarin Chinese) and 500-800ms (English, Urdu). Although there is no detectable uniform, language-invariant response to wh-constructions across languages, there are a number of shared features in the evoked response between any pair of languages, i.e., wh-in-situ constructions generate an evoked response in midline anterior sensors. Moreover, behavioral evidence shows a robust cross-language cost of processing wh-object constructions, regardless of their surface form. This demonstrates that readers of diverse languages can process some grammatical information in a short 200ms fixation, and that the RPVP methodology may enable new ways of linking cognitive neuroscience of language to comparative syntax, i.e., the systematic description of similarities and differences between grammatical structures.