Shared neural computations for syntactic and morphological structures: evidence from Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

What are syntactic relations, and how does our brain infer them from a string of text characters? In the EEG study reported here we aimed to investigate these questions by contrasting syntactically separable compounds (zao4...fan3 -> 'rebel') and non-separable compounds (chi2yi2 -> 'hesitate') in Mandarin Chinese. Because both kinds of compounds have non-compositional meanings, their syntactic differences provide an elegant means for dissociating syntactic from semantic relations. Because non-separable compounds fit the traditional criteria for 'wordhood', this contrast also provides a means for asking whether syntactic and morphological relations are inferred in qualitatively different ways. We found that, relative to non-separable compounds, syntactically separable compounds elicited a left anterior negativity (LAN) effect between 275-400ms. Even though readers were always presented with the compounds in their unseparated form, our results suggest that the potentially separable compound forms drive the inference of a more complex set of underlying syntactic relations. In a companion manipulation in the same participants, we observed a qualitatively similar LAN effect when comparing non-separable compound nouns with simplex nouns. This finding raises doubts for the existence of a clear-cut distinction between 'syntax' and 'morphology', at least in processing.

Evaluating the timecourses of morpho-orthographic, lexical, and grammatical processing following rapid parallel visual presentation: an EEG investigation in English

“…This approach is attractive, because it allows for more closely aligning the reading processes supporting word and sentence reading. This result would be consistent with other findings in psycholinguistics suggesting a blurry boundary between sentences and words (Krauska & Lau 2023, Yu & Lau 2024), and consistent with positions in theoretical linguistics that eschew the distinction between words and sentence constructions (Halle & Marantz 1993).…”