The N400 and Post-N400 positivity effect in Mandarin classifier-noun congruence: An ERP study

Abstract The current study employed electrophysiological measures to investigate semantic processing within a local classifier-noun phrase in Chinese. Toward this aim, semantic congruence between classifiers and nouns was manipulated, resulting in four conditions: (i) a strong-constraint/high-cloze plausible (SP) condition, (ii) a weak-constraint/low-cloze plausible (WP) condition, (iii) a strong-constraint/implausible (SI) condition, and (iv) a weak-constraint/implausible (WI) condition. Participants were asked to judge the acceptability of the classifier-noun pairs. Our results corroborated previous findings by showing that the processing of classifier-noun congruence is sensitive to manipulations of constraint and cloze probability, as indicated by a gradient N400 effect (SP