Grammaticality illusion or ambiguous interpretation? Event-related
  potentials reveal the nature of the missing-NP effect in Mandarin
  centre-embedded structures
Qihang Yang Caimei Yang Yu Liao Ziman Zhuang
In several languages, omitting a verb phrase (VP) in double centre-embedded
structures creates a grammaticality illusion. Similar illusion also exhibited
in Mandarin missing-NP double centre-embedded structures. However, there is no
consensus on its very nature. Instead of treating it as grammaticality
illusion, we argue that ambiguous interpretations of verbs can best account for
this phenomenon in Mandarin. To further support this hypothesis, we conducted
two electroencephalography (EEG) experiments on quasi double centre-embedded
structures whose complexity is reduced by placing the self-embedding relative
clauses into the sentence's subject position. Experiment 1 showed that similar
phenomenon even exhibited in this structure, evidenced by an absence of P600
effect and a presence of N400 effect. In Experiment 2, providing semantic cues
to reduce ambiguity dispelled this illusion, as evidenced by a P600 effect. We
interpret the results under garden-path theory and propose that word-order
difference may account for this cross-linguistic variation.