Adjective placement

Relevant Publications

• Wolpert M, Zhang H, Baum S, Steinhauer K, 2024 | Native and non-native parsing of adjective placement – an ERP study of Mandarin and English sentence processing

Most languages have the distinct word class of adjective to modify nouns. How adjectives are arranged and modified within a sentence, however, varies among languages. Steinhauer (2014) found that violations of adjective-noun order in English elicit biphasic N400-P600 ERP responses. Importantly, advanced learners of English showed a similar pattern to their native counterparts, suggesting these structures are processed by a similar mechanism in both native and non-native English speakers. This native-like processing by non-native English speakers was present whether their first language had adjective-noun order (i.e., Mandarin) or noun-adjective order (i.e., French).

Although native and non-native English speakers have been shown to have the same ERP response to adjective placement violations, it is not trivial whether this finding should extend to Mandarin adjective placement. Although they typically precede the nouns they modify, Mandarin adjectives have different properties from English, and may frequently occur in predicate position without an intervening copula. For example, it is possible to say both 等绿灯了 “wait green light” and 等灯绿了 “wait light green.” This variety in adjective placement can communicate subtle differences in meaning.

We tested processing of Mandarin adjective-noun pairs in both native and non-native speakers. We constructed sentences such that the structure licensed only adjective-noun order and not noun-adjective order (e.g., 父亲最近想看新书了 “father recently wants to read new books”). For native speakers, we found the same N400-P600 pattern as previously reported for English, but with an additional N400 effect on the adjective in the correct word order. A possible explanation for this additional effect is a difference in the lexical nature of adjective-noun pairs between Mandarin and English. For non-native speakers, the incorrect adjective placement elicited only an N400 effect with no subsequent P600, a pattern that is consistent with relatively low second language proficiency.

Alongside these group-level results, we found more insight by considering individual differences in N400 and P600 amplitudes. Both native and non-native participants showed a range of responses, from N400-dominant, to biphasic, to P600-dominant. With this response range, there still was not a correlation between any behavioral measure and ERP amplitude. These results add more nuance to existing discussion on N400-P600 effects in individual differences (e.g., Tanner & Van Hell, 2014 and Fromont, Steinhauer, & Royle, 2020).

Note that we used single-morpheme adjectives that can be paired with nouns without the particle 的 DE. These structure are considered to be undergoing a process of lexicalization and so may be qualitatively different from more typical adjective-DE-noun structures, especially when considering sentence processing.