When “He” Can Also Be “She”: An ERP Study of Reflexive Pronoun Resolution in Written Mandarin Chinese

When “He” Can Also Be “She”: An ERP Study of Reflexive Pronoun Resolution in Written Mandarin Chinese

The gender information in written Chinese third person pronouns is not symmetrically encoded: the character for "he" (, with semantic radical , meaning human) is used as a default referring to every individual, while the character for "she" (, with semantic radical , meaning woman) indicates females only. This critical feature could result in different patterns of processing of gender informati...

An Empirical Study on Pronoun Resolution in Chinese

In this paper, we discuss how to identify three important features by our empirical observation gender and number features of antecedent as well as grammatical role of personal pronoun, which have no overt mark in Chinese. Only a tagger with extended POS set and some special word-lists are used. Finally, We describe an implemented prototypical system to resolve personal pronouns. Evaluation sho...

Null pronoun variation in Mandarin Chinese

Bayesian Pronoun Interpretation in Mandarin Chinese

Kehler and Rohde (2013) proposed a Bayesian theory of pronoun interpretation where the influence of world knowledge emerges as effects on the prior and the influence of information structure as effects on the likelihood: P(referent|pronoun) μ P(pronoun|referent)P(referent). Here we present two experiments on Mandarin Chinese that allow us to test the generality of the theory for a language with...

Who is ziji? ERP responses to the Chinese reflexive pronoun during sentence comprehension.

The Principle A of Chomsky's (1981) Binding Theory requires the reflexive pronoun in a sentence to be bound to its antecedent within its governing category. However, in Chinese sentences with a common structure "P-NP(1)+VP(1)+P-NP(2)+VP(2)+ziji", in which the P-NP stands for personal name and the reflexive ziji (standing for myself, himself, herself, yourself, ourselves etc., depending on conte...