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Do grammatical similarities in syntactic structure between Japanese and Chinese affect brain activity related to second language processing?
Poster Session A - Sandbox Series, Thursday, October 24, 10:00 - 11:30 am, Great Hall 3 and 4
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Yaxin Cui1, Shinri Ohta2; 1Kyushu University
Experimental linguists have focused on the neural patterns of bilingual individuals when processing second languages (L2). It is common for L2 learners to find syntactic similarities between their first language (L1) and L2. Previous studies have verified that cross-language grammatical similarity can be an essential factor influencing L2 syntactic processing (Tolentino, L. C., & Tokowicz, N., 2011). However, most studies have primarily focused on Indo-European languages such as English and Spanish, leaving research on non-Western languages like Chinese and Japanese underexplored. It is widely known that Japanese is an agglutinative language and Chinese is an isolating language, both of which are similar in terms of some vocabulary and the use of characters (kanji) but differ significantly in word order. Except for the predicate that appears at the end of a sentence, the word order in Japanese sentences is relatively flexible. In contrast, in Chinese, word order is closely related to grammatical relations, and changes in word order directly affect the semantics and pragmatics of sentences. Do these differences in grammatical constructions affect the brain activity of bilingual individuals, and if there is an effect, in what form does it present? These questions remind us that the neural patterns of Japanese-Chinese bilinguals when processing sentences with different word orders require further experimental investigations. The present study concerns the brain activity of Chinese learners of Japanese and native Japanese speakers. We use violated and unviolated Japanese sentences with varying degrees of syntactic similarity to Chinese as stimulus materials. For instance, (1) 綺麗な花-kirei na hana (ZH: 美丽的花, měi lì de huā; EN: beautiful flower)→花綺麗-hana kirei (* flower beautiful); (2) 女の子はリンゴを食べた。-onnanoko ha ringo wo tabeta (ZH: 女孩吃了苹果, nǚ hái chī le píng guǒ; EN: The girl ate the apple)→女の子は食べたリンゴ--onnanoko ha tabeta ringo (* The apple the girl ate) The two materials in the first set have more similar word order and thus higher syntactic similarity. The event-related potentials (ERPs), such as N400, left anterior negativity (LAN), and P600, will be collected to detect the brainwave characteristics of participants as they perform Japanese sentence judgment tasks. This study can identify similarities and differences in the brain activity of Chinese learners of Japanese and native speakers of Japanese when processing Japanese sentences with high and low similarity in syntactic structure to Chinese. We hypothesize that the more the word order of a Japanese sentence aligns with its corresponding Chinese sentence, the more similar ERP patterns of Chinese learners of Japanese will be to those of native Japanese speakers during sentence processing. Specifically, we predict that a strong P600 effect will be found in violated syntactically similar structures and a weaker P600 in violated syntactically dissimilar structures. Moreover, we expect the LAN will be more prominent in native speakers than in L2 learners.
Topic Areas: Syntax and Combinatorial Semantics, Language Development/Acquisition