Processing of implicit time: Evidence from event-related potentials

The previous studies on the mechanism of aspectual coercion processing were focused on English, Polish, and Japanese, with a lack of studies on Chinese. The present study focused on Chinese aspectual coercion, an expression of implicit time, and explored the cognitive mechanism of aspectual coercion processing in Chinese. In our experiment, we manipulated two kinds of stimulus onset asynchrony(SOA). In long SOA, early Anterior Negativity(AN) and late AN were elicited; in short SOA, there was a triphasic effect of N400, late AN and semantic P600. The results showed that early AN in long SOA may be related to predicting errors; late AN may reflect reinterpretation process of lexical aspect; N400 in short SOA suggested that aspectual coercion processing may refer to semantic processing; semantic P600 in short SOA may reflect secondary reinterpretation or repairing of lexical aspect. Meanwhile, the results also showed that aspectual coercion processing varies in different languages and the processing of lexical aspect is different from that of grammatical aspect.