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Poster A in Poster Session A: Tuesday, August 4, 9:30 – 11:15 am, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Neural Encoding of Syntactic Movement in English but Not Chinese

Yuhan Huang¹, Zhengwu Ma¹, Jixing Li¹; ¹City University of Hong Kong

Presenter: Yuhan Huang

Syntactic movement is a central construct in generative linguistics to account for word-order variation and long-distance dependencies. In this framework, movement derives the "surface" representation of a sentence from its underlying "deep" structure, displacing elements and leaving "traces" in their original positions. In this study, we examine the neural basis of movement in English and Chinese by correlating brain activity during naturalistic listening with syntactic features derived from X-bar-style parse trees, including node counts, traces, and word embeddings based on surface and deep structures. We find that measures reflecting deep structure significantly predict neural responses in English but not in Chinese, offering partial support for movement-based theories while highlighting clear cross-linguistic differences.

Topic Area: Auditory, Speech & Language Processing