RESUMEN
This study aimed to investigate how age affects the ability to comprehend sentence meaning, specifically how individuals resolve pronouns to their corresponding nouns. The study included 34 young participants (20-29 years old) and 34 older participants (60-81 years old). The participants were presented with sentences containing two characters and a third-person singular pronoun. Stereotypical genders associated with character names were manipulated such that the pronoun had either one, two, or no possible antecedents, rendering the pronoun referentially unambiguous, ambiguous, or mismatched, respectively. Consistent with the prior findings on preserved syntactic processing with advanced age, event-related potential data time-locked to the critical pronouns showed a P600 effect to mismatched pronouns regardless of age. These results indicate that older adults, like their younger counterparts, have a strong preference for readily available antecedents. When the pronoun was ambiguous, younger adults showed a typical Nref effect-a sustained anterior negativity associated with elaborative inferencing to search for the referent. Older adults did not exhibit this effect, suggesting a reduction in elaborative processes for establishing coherence. Nevertheless, the Nref response to ambiguous pronouns was observed in a subset of older adults, who also showed a Nref instead of P600 response to mismatched pronouns. Overall, individuals who elicited the Nref response to ambiguous pronouns were associated with a higher level of print exposure, suggesting that life-long reading experience may help to counteract age-related decline. Together, these findings help characterize the differential effects of aging on pronominal understanding and provide initial electrophysiological evidence of the protective benefit of print exposure on language processing in the aging population. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
RESUMEN
Classic linguistic analyses assume that syntax is the center of linguistic system. Under this assumption, a finite set of rules can produce an infinite number of sentences. By contrast, construction grammar posits that grammar emerges from language use. Chinese quadrisyllabic idiomatic expressions (QIEs) offer a testing ground for this theoretical construct owing to their high productivity. To understand the cognitive processing of structure and meaning during reading comprehension, we used a semantic judgment task to measure behavioral performance and brain activation (functional MRI). Participants were 19 Mandarin native speakers and 19 L2 learners of intermediate and advanced levels of Mandarin. In the task, participants were instructed to indicate whether the interpretation of a QIE was correct. Our behavioral results showed that L2 learners processed high frequency QIEs faster than low frequency ones. By contrast, low frequency QIEs were processed faster than high frequency ones by native speakers. This phenomenon may be attributed to semantic satiation which impedes the interpretation of high frequency QIEs. To unravel the puzzle, a further functional MRI experiment on native speakers was conducted. The results revealed that the comparison of high-frequency and low-frequency QIEs promoted significant anterior cingulate activation. Also, the comparison of idiomatic and pseudo-idiomatic constructions exhibited significant activation in the bilateral temporal poles, a region that computes semantics rather than syntactic structure. This result indicated that, for native speakers, processing Chinese idiomatic constructions is a conceptually driven process.
RESUMEN
The present study aimed to investigate the neural mechanism underlying semantic processing in Mandarin Chinese adult learners, focusing on the learners who were Indo-European language speakers with advanced levels of proficiency in Mandarin Chinese. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging technique and a semantic judgment task to test 24 Mandarin Chinese adult learners (L2 group) and 26 Mandarin Chinese adult native speakers (L1 group) as a control group. In the task, participants were asked to indicate whether two-character pairs were related in meaning. Compared to the L1 group, the L2 group had greater activation in the bilateral occipital regions, including the fusiform gyrus and middle occipital gyrus, as well as the right superior parietal lobule. On the other hand, less activation in the bilateral temporal regions was found in the L2 group relative to the L1 group. Correlation analysis further revealed that, within the L2 group, increased activation in the left middle temporal gyrus/superior temporal gyrus (M/STG, BA 21) was correlated with higher accuracy in the semantic judgment task as well as better scores in the two vocabulary tests, the Assessment of Chinese character list for grade 3 to grade 9 (A39) and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised. In addition, functional connectivity analysis showed that connectivity strength between the left fusiform gyrus and left ventral inferior frontal gyrus (IFG, BA 47) was modulated by the accuracy in the semantic judgment task in the L1 group. By contrast, this modulation effect was weaker in the L2 group. Taken together, our study suggests that Mandarin Chinese adult learners rely on greater recruitment of the bilateral occipital regions to process orthographic information to access the meaning of Chinese characters. Also, our correlation results provide convergent evidence that the left M/STG (BA 21) plays a crucial role in the storage of semantic knowledge for readers to access to conceptual information. Moreover, the connectivity results indicate that the left ventral pathway (left fusiform gyrus-left ventral IFG) is associated with orthographic-semantic processing in Mandarin Chinese. However, this semantic-related ventral pathway might require more time and language experience to be developed, especially for the late adult learners of Mandarin Chinese.