Yao Panpan, Stockall Linnaea, Hall David, Borer Hagit
School of Psychology, Beijing Language and Culture University, #15 Xueyuan Street, Haidian District, Beijing, China.
Department of Linguistics, Queen Mary University of London, ArtsOne. 1.10, London, UK.
J Psycholinguist Res. 2022 Apr;51(2):341-371. doi: 10.1007/s10936-022-09844-0. Epub 2022 Feb 22.
Using the Visual World Paradigm, the current study aimed to explore whether the mass/count distinction is determined by syntax in Mandarin Chinese, focusing on classified nouns in nominal phrases. By using dual-role classifiers, ontological count and mass nouns, and phrase structures with and without biased syntactic cues we found that the mass/count distinction is initially computed using phrase structure but can be overridden in cases where the syntax is incompatible with nouns' ontological meanings. The results indicate that in Mandarin Chinese, syntactic cues can be rapidly used to make predictions about upcoming information in real time processing.
