Presentation: Chinese Sentence Comprehension
Julie Boland presented the colloquium talk at Michigan State University’s Linguistics Colloquium series on Oct. 9.
Title and Abstract
Chinese Sentence Comprehension: Recent Findings
Over the last several years, my colleagues and I have been investigating
syntactic processing in Chinese using self-paced reading, eye-tracking,
and ERP paradigms. I review our recent results in three domains: (i)
What cues guide incremental interpretation in the face is syntactic
ambiguity? (ii) To what extent are syntactic alternatives maintained in
parallel? (iii) Must semantic interpretations always be licensed by
grammatical structure? I also compare our Chinese findings with results
from similar experiments done in English and other Indo-European
languages, with an interest in understanding what aspects of sentence
comprehension are universal and what aspects might be tuned by
language-specific properties.