An ERP study of the processing of epistemic modality adverbs yexu and yiding in Mandarin Chinese.

Numerous studies have demonstrated that word frequency influences sentence processing. However, the impact of frequently used epistemic modality adverbs on sentence processing is less clear. The aim of the present study is to investigate the processing of Chinese epistemic modality adverbs by means of ERPs (event-related potentials) based on degrees of modal certainty encoded by different orthographic forms of two epistemic adverbs yexu (possibly) and yiding (surely) co-occurred with two psychological verbs guji (estimate) and quexin (convince) in Mandarin Chinese sentences as Wo guji Xiaolin yexu hui jingxuan banzhang (I estimate Xiaolin possibly future compete monitor).

An ERP study on Chinese natives' second language syntactic grammaticalization.

The present study is concerned with how the Chinese learners of English grammaticalize different English syntactic rules. The ERPs (event related potentials) data were collected when participants performed English grammatical judgment. The experimental sentences varied in the degree of the similarity between the first language Chinese (L1) and the second language English (L2): (a) different in the L1 and the L2; (b) similar in the L1 and the L2; (c) unique to the L2.