Who is ziji or ta-ziji ? An ERP study on the processing mechanism of Chinese bare and compound reflexives

Abstract

Previous studies have shown that the constructed representations in online comprehension process are content-addressable, allowing the parser to retrieve dependencies between non-adjacent linguistic elements, such as reflexives and their antecedents, with syntactic and semantic cues serving as retrieval tools operating at distinct temporal stages. However, current research has not effectively addressed the retrieval patterns of Chinese ziji and ta-ziji in the binding of antecedents. This study employed event-related potentials (ERPs) to explore the roles of syntactic cues and animacy cues in the retrieval processes of ziji and ta-ziji using the sentence structure “P-NP1+VP1+P-NP2+ADV+VP2+ziji/ta-ziji+VP3+ADV+VP4+NP.” By constructing where reflexives could reference NP1, NP2, or both, the study examined cue effects. The results showed that ta-ziji elicited P300 and P600 effects when referencing out-of-domain antecedent NP1, reflecting the dominant role of syntactic cues in processing. In contrast, ziji did not produce significant electrophysiological responses but instead elicited P300 and P600 components when it could refer to both NP1 and NP2, indicating that animacy cues can guide the retrieval of ziji alongside syntactic cues during processing. These results suggest that the locality effect of ta-ziji is greater than that of ziji, with the former favoring the structure-favoring cue-based retrieval model, while the latter aligns with the standard cue-based retrieval model.