Selection of Chinese Classifiers in Noun Phrase Production Involves a Competitive Process

In Chinese, when objects are named with their quantity, a classifier must be inserted between the number and the noun to produce the legitimate quantity * classifier * noun phrase. In the past few decades, research has proposed different models and interpretations for determiner or grammatical gender effect found in Indo-European languages, whereas the Chinese classifier congruency, despite its analogy to grammatical agreement, is relatively less studied in terms of activation process. In this study, we adopted a picture-word interference paradigm to examine participants’ naming latency of multiple objects and their electroencephalographic signals in 4 conditions by manipulating two factors: semantic relatedness and classifier congruency. Results show that in noun phrase production, naming latency is significantly longer in classifier-incongruent and semantically related conditions than in classifier-congruent and semantically unrelated conditions. Also, an N400-like effect was...Show moreIn Chinese, when objects are named with their quantity, a classifier must be inserted between the number and the noun to produce the legitimate quantity * classifier * noun phrase. In the past few decades, research has proposed different models and interpretations for determiner or grammatical gender effect found in Indo-European languages, whereas the Chinese classifier congruency, despite its analogy to grammatical agreement, is relatively less studied in terms of activation process. In this study, we adopted a picture-word interference paradigm to examine participants’ naming latency of multiple objects and their electroencephalographic signals in 4 conditions by manipulating two factors: semantic relatedness and classifier congruency. Results show that in noun phrase production, naming latency is significantly longer in classifier-incongruent and semantically related conditions than in classifier-congruent and semantically unrelated conditions. Also, an N400-like effect was detected and found to be stronger in classifier-incongruent and semantically unrelated conditions. Together, the behavioral data and event-related potential analyses suggest that the use of classifier as a lexico-syntactic feature in Mandarin Chinese goes through a competitive selection process in noun phrase production. Findings are compared with an earlier study by Wang, Chen and Schiller (2018) that explored the same issues but in a bare noun naming setting where no significant difference by classifier congruency was found in naming latency. We therefore conclude that in accordance with Levelt’s model (Levelt, Roelofs & Meyer, 1999), classifier activation/selection takes place after the lemma retrieval process.Show less

Leiden University Student Repository

Documents

In Collections

Selection of Chinese Classifiers in Noun Phrase Production Involves a Competitive Process