What’s in a Name? Electrophysiological Differences in Processing Proper Nouns in Mandarin Chinese

Bernard A. J. Jap, Yu-Yin Hsu, Lavinia Salicchi, Yu Xi Li


Abstract
The current study examines how proper names and common nouns in Chinese are cognitively processed during sentence comprehension. EEG data was recorded when participants were presented with neutral contexts followed by either a proper name or a common noun. Proper names in Chinese often consist of characters that can function independently as words or be combined with other characters to form words, potentially benefiting from the semantic features carried by each character. Using cluster-based permutation tests, we found a larger N400 for common nouns when compared to proper names. Our results suggest that the semantics of characters do play a role in facilitating the processing of proper names. This is consistent with previous behavioral findings on noun processing in Chinese, indicating that common nouns require more cognitive resources to process than proper names. Moreover, our results suggest that proper names are processed differently between alphabetic languages and Chinese language.
Anthology ID:
2024.cogalex-1.9
Volume:
Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon @ LREC-COLING 2024
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Michael Zock, Emmanuele Chersoni, Yu-Yin Hsu, Simon de Deyne
Venue:
CogALex
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
79–85
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.cogalex-1.9
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Bernard A. J. Jap, Yu-Yin Hsu, Lavinia Salicchi, and Yu Xi Li. 2024. What’s in a Name? Electrophysiological Differences in Processing Proper Nouns in Mandarin Chinese. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon @ LREC-COLING 2024, pages 79–85, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
What’s in a Name? Electrophysiological Differences in Processing Proper Nouns in Mandarin Chinese (Jap et al., CogALex 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.cogalex-1.9.pdf