Processing different levels of syntactic hierarchy: An ERP study on Chinese

The event-related potential (ERP) technique was used to investigate the neural dynamics in processing different levels of the hierarchical syntactic structure during comprehension of Chinese sentences with the ba construction. In these sentences, the structural auxiliaries, which mark either the adjective (-de) or the adverb (-di) category, were embedded in a hierarchical structure at the lower level, i.e., BA – adjective (-de)–noun–verb, or at the higher level, i.e., BA – noun–adverb (-di)–verb. Violations of the lower- and the higher-level structural constraints were constructed by misapplication of these structural auxiliaries. Participants were required to read all the sentences for comprehension and to complete a sentence recognition test at the end of the experiment. Violation of the lower-level constraints elicited a left-lateralized, anteriorly maximized negativity, whereas violation of the higher-level constraints elicited a right anterior negativity (RAN) and a right centro-parietal negativity (N400) from 300 to 500 ms post-onset of the auxiliary phrase. Neither type of violation led to a late positivity effect on the critical auxiliary phrases. These findings suggest that processing different levels of syntactic hierarchy during natural language comprehension may involve different neural mechanisms.