When "He" Can Also Be "She": An ERP Study of Reflexive Pronoun Resolution in Written Mandarin Chinese.

ABSTRACT: The gender information in written Chinese third person pronouns is not symmetrically encoded: the character for "he" (, with semantic radical , meaning human) is used as a default referring to every individual, while the character for "she" (, with semantic radical , meaning woman) indicates females only. This critical feature could result in different patterns of processing of gender information in text, but this is an issue that has seldom been addressed in psycholinguistics. In Chinese, the written forms of the reflexive pronouns are composed of a pronoun plus the reflexive "/self" (/himself and /herself). The present study focuses on how such gender specificity interacts with the gender type of an antecedent, whether definitional (proper name) or stereotypical (stereotypical role noun)

SUBMITTER: Su JJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4751802 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature