Processing Evidence for the Grammatical Encoding of the Mass/Count Distinction in Mandarin Chinese

Panpan Yao; Linnaea Stockall; David Hall; Hagit Borer

doi:10.1007/s10936-022-09844-0

Processing Evidence for the Grammatical Encoding of the Mass/Count Distinction in Mandarin Chinese

J Psycholinguist Res. 2022 Apr;51(2):341-371. doi: 10.1007/s10936-022-09844-0. Epub 2022 Feb 22.

Authors

Panpan Yao¹, Linnaea Stockall², David Hall³, Hagit Borer⁴

Affiliations

¹ School of Psychology, Beijing Language and Culture University, #15 Xueyuan Street, Haidian District, Beijing, China. yaopp@blcu.edu.cn.
² Department of Linguistics, Queen Mary University of London, ArtsOne. 1.10, London, UK.
³ Department of Linguistics, Queen Mary University of London, ArtsOne. 1.21, London, UK.
⁴ Department of Linguistics, Queen Mary University of London, ArtsOne. 1.12, London, UK.

PMID: 35192128
DOI: 10.1007/s10936-022-09844-0

Abstract

Using the Visual World Paradigm, the current study aimed to explore whether the mass/count distinction is determined by syntax in Mandarin Chinese, focusing on classified nouns in nominal phrases. By using dual-role classifiers, ontological count and mass nouns, and phrase structures with and without biased syntactic cues we found that the mass/count distinction is initially computed using phrase structure but can be overridden in cases where the syntax is incompatible with nouns' ontological meanings. The results indicate that in Mandarin Chinese, syntactic cues can be rapidly used to make predictions about upcoming information in real time processing.

Keywords: Anticipatory eye movements; Lexical semantics; Mandarin Chinese; Mass/count distinction; Syntactic prediction; Visual world paradigm.

MeSH terms

China
Cues
Humans
Language
Language Development*
Semantics*

Grants and funding

613465/European Union's Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no. 613465: AThEME (Advancing the European Multilingual Experience)