The influence of Chinese prosody on syntactic processing of Chinese idioms. (In Chinese)
汉语韵律对汉语成语句法加工的影响
Chen Bai 白晨; Xiaoyan Xie 谢晓燕; Shengli Feng 冯胜利
Abstract 摘要
This study examined three different types of four-character Chinese idioms, including those involving a coordinate relationship, a subject-predicate relationship, or a prosody-syntax mismatched structure, within the theoretical framework of prosodic syntax in Chinese, using Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) to explore the interaction between syntax and prosody in the processing of these Chinese idioms. It is found that both the subject-predicate and the prosody-syntax mismatched idioms elicited the P600 effect, whreas the coordinate idioms did not, and there is no significant difference in brain potentials between the subject-predicate and the prosody-syntax mismatched idioms. The results show that the cognitive processing of Chinese idioms is not a synthetic process of meaning extraction, but an analytic process based on the prosody-syntax interaction within the idioms. In addition, the processing of Chinese idioms is not affected by the syntactic relation between the constituents within the idiom. This study supports the view of prosodic syntax in Chinese that syntactic processing of Chinese idioms may be contrained by prosodic features.
Subject Keywords 主题词
Chinese idioms 汉语成语 Chinese prosody 汉语韵律 Syntactic structure 句法结构 ERPs
Journal of Chinese Linguistics vol.47, no.2 (June 2019): 406-424
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