When Chinese semantics meets failed syntax

Previous event-related potential studies in Indo-European languages reported a surprising finding that failed syntactic category processing appears to block lexical-semantic integration, suggesting a functional primacy of syntax over semantics. An event-related potential experiment was conducted to test whether there is such primacy in Chinese sentence reading, using sentences containing either semantic only violations, combined syntactic category and semantic violations, or no violations. Semantic only violations elicited a centro-parietal negativity and combined violations a broadly distributed, but centro-parietally focused negativity, both in the 300–500 ms window and followed by a P600, suggesting that semantic integration proceeds even when syntactic category processing fails. Thus, there is no functional primacy of syntactic category over semantic processes during Chinese sentence reading.