Cognitive entailments among "the true, the good, the beautiful": a mainland Chinese sample.

Philosophers and cognitive scientists have long debated about the entailments among "the true, the good, the beautiful" (TGB hereafter). In the current article, we directly probed mainland Chinese subjects' cognitive entailment among TGB. Using 1-7 (Experiment 1) and 1-6 (Experiment 2) Likert scales, we convergently observed that mainland Chinese subjects tend to think that the beautiful is not the true, and that the good is the beautiful. Additionally, Experiment 1 also revealed that mainland Chinese subjects tend to think that the true is not the beautiful. Some of these results may reflect anthropological universals, and some others may reflect cultural specifics. Experiment 3 revealed that the most popular translation of TGB in Chinese into English is rather "the true, the kind, the beautiful", suggesting that the three concepts mapped to TGB in Chinese is not one-to-one mapped to the three concepts mapped to TGB in English. Therefore, caution should be exercised when making cross-linguistic or cross-cultural comparisons about TGB in the future.

The semantic processing of syntactic structure in sentence comprehension: an ERP study.

Previous studies have demonstrated that verbs violating selectional constraints of their arguments elicit N400 effects in the event-related potentials (ERPs) in sentence comprehension. The present study examined brain responses to verbs violating semantic constraints specified by syntactic structures (i.e., phrasal constructions), contrasting them with those elicited by lexical-semantic violations between verbs and their arguments. The construction-based semantic violations gave rise to a posterior N400, while the lexical-based semantic violations produced a much stronger N400 with a broader scalp distribution. These findings suggested that the integration of verb meaning with prior sentence context is influenced not only by semantic features of preceding content words with which the verb co-occurs, but also by semantic properties of the syntactic structure in which the verb appears. This study provides online evidence supporting the constructionist approaches to language, which claim that syntactic structures may have their own (abstract) meanings, independent of lexical meanings of their constituent content words.

Semantic integration processes at different levels of syntactic hierarchy during sentence comprehension: an ERP study.

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 restrictions of the classifier at the lower-level and of the verb at the higher-level and the classifier is also constrained by the verb at the higher-level. Semantic congruencies between verb, classifier, and noun were manipulated, resulting in five types of sentences: correct sentences, sentences with the single classifier-noun mismatch, sentences with the single verb-noun mismatch, sentences with the double-mismatch in classifier-noun and verb-noun, and sentences with the triple-mismatch in classifier-noun, verb-noun and verb-classifier. Compared with correct sentences, all four types of mismatches elicited N400 effects on the noun, with the effect in the double-mismatch equal to the effect in the single classifier-noun mismatch but larger than the effect in the single verb-noun mismatch. In addition, the single verb-noun mismatch and the double-mismatch elicited a left-posterior positivity effect and an anterior negativity effect in the 550-800 ms time window on the noun, with the effects larger in the double-mismatch than in the single-mismatch. The classifier-noun mismatch also elicited the late anterior negativity effect on the noun. Although the triple-mismatch did not induce a significant late positivity effect on the noun, it did on the classifier. The pattern of the N400 effects suggests that semantic processes at different levels of syntactic hierarchy interact in integrating the incoming word into the prior sentence context with neither process overriding the other. The late-posterior positivity effect may reflect the coordination of various semantic integration processes across hierarchical levels during sentence comprehension.