When Chinese verb transitivity meets wrong syntactic category

Two experiments using the same stimuli were performed to examine whether verb transitivity processing proceeds even when phrase structure building based on syntactic categories (noun, verb, etc.) fails during Chinese sentence reading. The sentences contained (a) no violations, (b) transitivity violations, (c) syntactic category violations, or (d) combined syntactic category and transitivity violations. Event-related brain potentials were recorded in Experiment 1, in which participants performed a sentence acceptability task. Transitivity violations elicited an N400 effect in an early (200-450-ms) time window, no matter whether there was a simultaneous syntactic category violation or not. This finding suggests an independence of transitivity processing from local phrase structure building using syntactic category information. In Experiment 2, participants were asked to make speeded responses upon detecting an anomaly. The detection latencies were longer for the transitivity than for the syntactic category violations, which reduces the possibility that the independence of transitivity is due to the relative temporal point at which syntactic category and transitivity violations are detected. Overall, these results reveal a functional independence of transitivity from syntactic category, at least for Chinese.