The time course of semantic and syntactic processing in reading Chinese: Evidence from ERPs

The time course of semantic and syntactic processing in reading Chinese was examined by recording event-related brain potentials (ERPs) as native Chinese speakers read individually presented sentences for comprehension and performed semantic plausibility judgments. The transitivity of the verbs in Chinese ba/bei constructions was manipulated to form three types of stimuli: Congruent sentences (CON), sentences with semantic violation (SEM), and sentences with combined semantic and syntactic violation (SEM+SYN). Compared with the critical words in CON, those in SEM and SEM+SYN elicited an N400-P600 biphasic pattern. The N400 effects in both violation conditions were of similar size and distribution, but the P600 in SEM+SYN was bigger than that in SEM. Overall, the lack of a difference between SEM and SEM+SYN in the earlier time window (i.e., N400 window) suggested that syntactic processing in Chinese does not necessarily occur earlier than semantic processing.