The effects of punctuations in Chinese sentence comprehension: An ERP study

In this paper, we aim to study the effects of Chinese punctuations in sentence comprehension, and to prove metafunctions of Chinese punctuations, namely the ideational, interpersonal and textual metafunctions. By using Chinese sentences containing punctuations as stimuli, an experiment with three tasks is conducted using event-related potential (ERP) method. Focusing on ERP components such as P2, closure positive shift (CPS), late positive shift, N400 and P600, we have proven that: (1) punctuations in Chinese sentences could affect the earlier orthographic extraction processing; (2) punctuations in Chinese sentences could serve on the prosodic boundary in reading; (3) the commas within Chinese sentences could change the syntactic structures of sentences, and play a role of lexical parsing and sentence phrasing, leading the semantic comprehension of sentences to be changed. The results show that ideational and textual metafunctions are present in Chinese punctuations, while the interpersonal metafunction of Chinese punctuations remains to be further identified. This study serves to extend the research of punctuations in linguistics.