Number in Mandarin Chinese: Behavioral and Electrophysiological Evidence Regarding Activation and Selection

This study investigates whether the lexico-syntactic 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 experiment, where they described displays containing either one or three identical objects (e.g., ‘一个苹果’ vs. ‘三个苹果’, ‘one apple’ vs. ‘three apples’). 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 number congruency 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 seem to suggest that “number” is not sensitive to our experimental manipulation during Mandarin Chinese quantity phrase production. Our data are in line with a language production model in which number processing differs from semantic processing.