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Conjunctions play a crucial role in the construction of a coherent mental representation by signaling coherence relations between clauses, especially for second language users. By using event-related potentials (ERPs), this study aimed to investigate how different conjunctions (so, and, although, or a full stop) affect the interpretation of a following ambiguous pronoun for both native and non-native speakers, in sentences such as Lily disappointed Nina, so she .... ERP results showed that relative to so, and, and full stop sentences, the pronoun in although clauses elicited a larger Nref (sustained negativity) response in both native (L1) readers and second language (L2) readers, irrespective of whether the verb in the first clause biased towards a particular noun phrase (NP) referent. Moreover, larger Nrefs to pronouns were seen in L2 than L1 readers when clauses were connected by so, although or a full stop. Additionally, larger Nref responses were evoked by pronouns in NP2- than NP1-biased conditions when the clauses were connected by the conjunction so or when sentences contained no overt conjunctions (full stop). These findings indicate that different conjunctions exert different modulating effects on resolving referential uncertainty/ambiguity. Relative to native speakers, non-native speakers are more likely to encounter referential uncertainty when the sentences are conjoined by conjunctions with more complex semantics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] This is the first report that provides electrophysiological evidence of syntactic priming in Chinese. [•] Priming effects were robust when the verb was repeated. [•] The P600 amplitude was reduced in repeated target sentences at the word de. [•] No significant effects were observed in target sentences with synonymous conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: There have been a number of behavioral and neural studies on the processing of syntactic gender and number agreement information, marked by different morpho-syntactic features during sentence comprehension. By using the event-related potential (ERP) technique, the present study investigated whether the processing of semantic gender information and the processing of notional number information can be differentiated and to what extent they might interact during Chinese pronoun resolution. The pronoun (with singular form in Experiment 1 and with plural form in Experiment 2) in a sentence matched its antecedent or mismatched it with respect to either biological gender or notional number or both. While the number mismatch elicited a P600 effect starting from 550ms (for singular pronoun) or 400ms (for plural pronoun) post-onset of the pronoun, the gender mismatch elicited an earlier (for singular) and larger (for both singular and plural) P600 effect. More importantly, the double mismatch produced a P600 effect identical to the effect elicited by the single gender mismatch. These results demonstrate that biological gender information and notional number information are processed differentially and have different processing priorities during Chinese pronoun resolution. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]