Frontiers in Psychology (Feb 2016)

When he can also be she: An ERP study of reflexive pronoun resolution in written Mandarin Chinese

  • Jui-Ju eSu,
  • Nicola eMolinaro,
  • Nicola eMolinaro,
  • Margaret eGillon-Dowens,
  • Pei- Shu eTsai,
  • Denise Hsien Wu,
  • Denise Hsien Wu,
  • Manuel eCarreiras,
  • Manuel eCarreiras,
  • Manuel eCarreiras

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00151
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 7

Abstract

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The gender information in written Chinese third person pronouns is not symmetrically encoded: the character for he (他, with semantic radical 人, meaning human) is used as a default referring to every individual, while the character for she (她, with semantic radical 女, 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 自己/self (他自己/himself and 她自己/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: 他自己/himself vs. specific: 她自己/herself). Results included a P200 attention related congruity effect for 他自己/himself and a P600 integration difficulty congruity effect for 她自己/herself. Reflexive pronoun specificity independently affected the P200 and N400 components. These results highlight the role of 他自己/himself as a default applicable to both genders and indicate that only the processing of 她自己/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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