Neural Mechanisms of Syntactic Movement: An ERPs Study of Chinese Passive Sentences

The current event. related potentials (ERPs) study examines the neural processing mechanism of syntactic movement, and especially explores whether syntactic movement processing should be modeled by a syntactically present trace or not. The materials include Chinese Concurrent Passive Sentences (NP1+bei+NP2+VP1+NP3+VP2) and the stuctural matching non. movement control sentence in the experiment. The ERP results revealed that at the sentence. final VP2's position, a larger anterior negativity and a smaller posterior P600 were elicited in the Concurrent Passive Sentences related to the control sentences. At the VP1's position, the similar anterior negativity effect was observed, but there were no other ERP differences between the Concurrent Passive Sentences and the control sentences. The anterior negativity effect should reflect the reactivation of the moved constituent from working memory, and the P600 effect involves the processing of the syntactic dependency construction between the moved constituent and its trace, but working memory load regulated the P600 effect. The present findings suggest the neural processing mechanisms of syntactic movement include syntactic working memory processing and syntactic integration processing which modeled by a syntactically present trace. The results also support the active filler strategy.