TY - JOUR
T1 - When "He" Can also be "She"
T2 - An ERP study of reflexive pronoun resolution in written Mandarin Chinese
AU - Su, Jui Ju
AU - Molinaro, Nicola
AU - Gillon-Dowens, Margaret
AU - Tsai, Pei Shu
AU - Wu, Denise H.
AU - Carreiras, Manuel
N1 - Funding Information:
This study is funded by the European Community's Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013), Marie Curie Initial Training Network - Language, Cognition and Gender, under grant agreement no. 237907 to JS, NM was partially founded by grant PSI2012-32350 from the Spanish Government, DW by grant MOST102-2628-H-008-002-MY3 from the Ministry of Science and Technology in Taiwan and MC by ERC-2011-ADG- 295362 grant from the European Research Council. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. We would like to thank Jenn-Yeu Chen of the National Taiwan Normal University, Natalie Hsu of the Tsing Hua University and Shu-Ping Huang at Sun Yat-Sen University, Taiwan, for their help in collecting the questionnaire data for the stereotypicality survey on Chinese role nouns. Special thanks to Shu-Ping Huang for her informative opinions related to Chinese linguistics.
PY - 2016/2/12
Y1 - 2016/2/12
N2 - The gender information in written Chinese third person pronouns is not symmetrically encoded: the character for "he" (with semantic radical, meaning human) is used as a default referring to every individual, while the character for "she" (with semantic radical, meaning woman) indicates females only. This critical feature could result in different patterns of processing of gender information in text, but this is an issue that has seldom been addressed in psycholinguistics. In Chinese, the written forms of the reflexive pronouns are composed of a pronoun plus the reflexive "self" (herself). The present study focuses on how such gender specificity interacts with the gender type of an antecedent, whether definitional (proper name) or stereotypical (stereotypical role noun) during reflexive pronoun resolution. In this event-related potential (ERP) study, gender congruity between a reflexive pronoun and its antecedent was studied by manipulating the gender type of antecedents and the gender specificity of reflexive pronouns (default: himself vs. specific: herself). Results included a P200 "attention related" congruity effect for himself and a P600 "integration difficulty" congruity effect for tli/herself. Reflexive pronoun specificity independently affected the P200 and N400 components. These results highlight the role of himself as a default applicable to both genders and indicate that only the processing of herself supports a two-stage model for anaphor resolution. While both reflexive pronouns are evaluated at the bonding stage, the processing of the gender-specific reflexive pronoun is completed in the resolution stage.
AB - The gender information in written Chinese third person pronouns is not symmetrically encoded: the character for "he" (with semantic radical, meaning human) is used as a default referring to every individual, while the character for "she" (with semantic radical, meaning woman) indicates females only. This critical feature could result in different patterns of processing of gender information in text, but this is an issue that has seldom been addressed in psycholinguistics. In Chinese, the written forms of the reflexive pronouns are composed of a pronoun plus the reflexive "self" (herself). The present study focuses on how such gender specificity interacts with the gender type of an antecedent, whether definitional (proper name) or stereotypical (stereotypical role noun) during reflexive pronoun resolution. In this event-related potential (ERP) study, gender congruity between a reflexive pronoun and its antecedent was studied by manipulating the gender type of antecedents and the gender specificity of reflexive pronouns (default: himself vs. specific: herself). Results included a P200 "attention related" congruity effect for himself and a P600 "integration difficulty" congruity effect for tli/herself. Reflexive pronoun specificity independently affected the P200 and N400 components. These results highlight the role of himself as a default applicable to both genders and indicate that only the processing of herself supports a two-stage model for anaphor resolution. While both reflexive pronouns are evaluated at the bonding stage, the processing of the gender-specific reflexive pronoun is completed in the resolution stage.
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U2 - 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00151
DO - 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00151
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85015986772
VL - 7
JO - Frontiers in Psychology
JF - Frontiers in Psychology
SN - 1664-1078
M1 - 151
ER -