Aging and individual differences in Chinese pronoun comprehension: an ERP study
Date Issued
2015
Date
2015
Author(s)
Lai, Chia-Ho
Abstract
The present study aims to investigate the age effects on comprehension of Chinese pronoun and corresponding electrophysiological changes. Pronoun comprehension involves the establishment of referential relationships between pronouns and antecedents. Sometimes the assignment of a pronoun is difficult since there might be more than one possible antecedents or no possible corresponding antecedent in the context. And recent studies showed that language processes that require more top-down resources, such as processing sentences with complex structure or selecting appropriate meanings for ambiguous words in a context, could be compromised with advancing age. In order to investigate age effects on referential processing, the present study used Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) to examine age differences in Mandarin Chinese pronoun comprehension. We manipulated the referential relations between pronouns and the number of possible antecedents in the sentences such that each pronoun has either (1) two antecedents (referentially ambiguous), (2) one antecedent (referentially unambiguous), or (3) zero antecedent (referential failure). And we recorded younger and older adults’ brain potentials while they were reading sentences in these situations. Our results showed that, consistent with the Dutch findings, relative to unambiguous pronouns, younger adults showed a sustained frontal negativity (Nref) to ambiguous pronouns and a central-posterior P600 effect to referentially failing pronouns. However, there are individual differences in processing referential failure, while the majority of the younger adults showed the P600 effects to referentially failing pronouns, some younger adults showed negativities instead. Older adults did not show the sustained frontal negativity effect to ambiguous pronouns, but a central-posterior negativity instead. On the other hand, older adults as a group showed little P600 effect to referentially failing pronouns but this was due to the cancellation of negative and positive effects we found in individual data. Therefore, our present findings suggest that, older adults are still able to do the resolution of referential ambiguity but with different brain potential patterns compared to younger adults. This may due to the changes on brain morphology or recruitment of neural resources with advancing age. Also, individual differences of processing of referential failure existed in both younger and older adults. People could use different processing strategies to comprehend referentially failing pronouns, such as attributing them to syntactic integration difficulties, semantic integration difficulties, or inventing a new possible referent. These different referential interpretations may mediate the electrophysiological effects in resolution of referential failure situations.
Subjects
aging
individual differences
pronoun
referential ambiguity
referential failure
event-related potentials
Type
thesis
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