Is Subject-First Preference Equal to Actor-First Preference or Topic-First Preference? Neurophysiological Evidence from Simple Sentence Processing in Chinese

An auditory ERP experiment was conducted to investigate whether Subject-first preference is equal to Actor-first preference or Topic-first preference.The initial arguments (NP1s) of simple sentences in Chinese were either animate or inanimate, and were either topicalized or not topicalized by the contexts.Our results revealed that the subject-first preference was independent from animacy and topicality, which supports that it is a universal processing strategy derived from minimal dependencies, as proposed by Bornkessel-Schlesewsky and Schlesewsky(2006, 2009) in the extended Argument Dependency Model.Our findings thus speak for the view that Subject-preference cannot be regarded as Actor-first preference or Topic-first preference but as a by-product of the processing system in minimizing dependencies.