Humans have special abilities in processing hierarchical, recursive structures. Here we investigated how an upcoming word embedded in a hierarchical structure is semantically integrated into the prior representation during sentence comprehension. Participants read Chinese sentences with a complex verb argument structure "subject…

There have been a number of behavioral and neural studies on the processing of syntactic gender and number agreement information, marked by different morpho-syntactic features during sentence comprehension. By using the event-related potential (ERP) technique, the present study investigated whether the processing of semantic gender information and…

An event-related potential (ERP) study was conducted to investigate the temporal neural dynamics of semantic integration processes at different levels of syntactic hierarchy during Chinese sentence reading. In a hierarchical structure, "subject noun" + "verb" + "numeral" + "classifier" + "object noun," the object noun is constrained by selectional…

Two intra-modal immediate repetition priming experiments ask whether speech inputs can link directly to abstract underlying representations, or whether access is mediated via intervening "access representations" of each word's surface phonetic form. (Author/VWL)