Research ReportThe interplay between referential processing and local syntactic/semantic processing: ERPs to written Chinese discourse

- The interplay between referential processing and local phrase processing was studied.
- The incoherence of local noun phrase elicited a P600 effect.
- Nrefs observed for coherent noun phrases were absent for incongruent noun phrases.
- Referential processing is not functionally independent of local phrase processing.
- Local phrase anomaly can block the processing of referential ambiguity in Chinese.

Two event-related brain potential experiments were conducted to investigate the functional interplay between discourse-level referential processing and local syntactic/semantic processing of phrases. We manipulated both the syntactic/semantic coherence of a noun phrase (NP) and the referential ambiguity of the same NP. Incoherence of the NP elicited a P600 effect in both experiments. Referential ambiguities elicited a sustained negativity (Nref) in a subset of the participants in both experiments. Crucially, among participants showing robust Nref effects to referential ambiguity in the coherent condition, Nref effects were absent when the NP was incoherent. These results provide evidence against theories in which referential processing is functionally independent of local syntactic/semantic processing of phrases. Instead, a local phrase anomaly can block aspects of referential processing concerning ambiguity.