Number in Mandarin Chinese: Behavioral and electrophysio-logical evidence regarding their activation and selection

This study investigates whether the feature "number" is activated and selected during the production of quantity phrases in Mandarin Chinese. Twenty-nine native Mandarin speakers participated in a picture-naming task, where they described displays containing either one or three identical objects. Each target picture was paired with four types of distractors (semantically related/unrelated bare nouns or plural phrases). Behavioral results showed that naming latencies were unaffected by the factor “number congruency” (i.e., whether the distractor was singular or plural) but were significantly slower in semantically related conditions compared to unrelated ones. Phrases referring to three objects were produced faster than those for one object, with no interaction between number congruency and semantic relatedness. Event-related potential (ERP) analyses revealed an N400-like effect, with more negative deflections for semantically unrelated distractors, but no significant effect of number congruency. These findings reveal a dissociation between number and semantic processing, with no observable effects of number congruency during Mandarin Chinese quantity phrase production, supporting a model where grammatical number processing differs from semantic processing in language production.