Being polite is an effective way to facilitate interpersonal communication. One of the key issues is how the human cognitive system perceives verbal politeness and deals with the cases in which politeness principles are violated. By using event-related potentials (ERPs), we aim to address the nature of real time processing of disrespectful reference in Mandarin utterance interpretation. The consistency between the social status of the communicating partners and the use of second-person pronoun was manipulated as a testing case. Participants read utterances in which the social status of the communicating partners was either consistent with the pronoun (e.g. respectful) or violated the pronoun (e.g. disrespectful), while undergoing the recording of electrophysiological activity on the scalp. Earlier research has demonstrated that semantic, syntactic and inferential pragmatic processing could be manifested in different ERP effects. Our ERP findings demonstrated that successful handling of disrespectful address may engage semantic-pragmatic mechanisms (as reflected by a N400 and late negativity effect), rather than a mechanism dealing with grammatical error. Moreover, the ERP responses were modulated by individual differences in tolerance to the disrespectful usage, gender, and social interactive ability. These ERP indices of real time processing of disrespectful utterances are consistent with the “conventionalization view” in im/politeness theory (Culpeper 2011; Terkourafi 2002, 2003, 2005).
2008Computing and recomputing discourse models: An ERP study. Journal of Memory and Language 59: 36–53.
Bonnefon, J., Feeney, A. & Villejoubert, G
2009When some is actually all: Scalar inferences in face-threatening contexts. Cognition 112: 249–258.
Bonnefon, J., Villejoubert, G
2006Tactful or doubtful? Expectations of politeness explain the severity bias in the interpretation of probability phrases. Psychological Science 17: 747–751.
Brennan, S.E., Galati, A. & Kuhlen, A
2010Two minds, one dialog: Coordinating speaking and understanding. In Psychology of Learning and Motivation, Vol. 53, B. Ross (ed.) New York NY: Academic Press/Elsevier.
Brown, P. & Levinson, S
1987Politeness: Some Universals in Language Wsage. Cambridge: CUP.
Cansler, D. & Stiles, W
1981Relative status and interpersonal presumptuousness. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 17: 459–471.
Chao, Y
1956Chinese terms of address. Language 32: 217–241.
Chen, X
2014Politeness processing as situated social cognition: A RT-theoretic account. Journal of Pragmatics 71: 117–131.
Chentsova-Dutton, Y., Tsai, J
2007Gender differences in emotional response among European Americans and Hmong Americans. Cognition and Emotion 21: 162–181.
Coulson, S., King, J.W. & Kutas, M
1998Expect the unexpected: Event-related brain response to morphosyntactic violations. Language and Cognitive Processes 13(1): 21–58.
Coulson, S., & Williams, R
2005Hemispheric asymmetries and joke comprehension. Neuropsychologia 43: 128–141.
Coulson, S. & Wu, Y
2005Right hemisphere activation of joke-related information: an event-related brain potential study. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 17: 494–506.
Coulson, S. & Van Petten, C
2007A special role for the right hemisphere in metaphor comprehension?: ERP evidence from hemifield presentation. Brain Research 1146: 128–145.
Culpeper, J
1996Towards an anatomy of impoliteness. Journal of Pragmatics 25: 349–367.
Culpeper, J
2012(Im) politeness: Three issues. Journal of Pragmatics 44(9): 1128–1133.
Culpeper, J
2011Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence. Cambridge: CUP.
Davis, M
1980A multidimensional approach to individual differences in empathy. JSAS Catalog of Selected Documents in Psychology 10: 85.
Federmeier, W., Ochoa-Dewald, E., & Kutas, M
2007Multiple effects of sentential constraint on word processing. Brain Research 1146: 75–84.
Friederici, A
2011The brain basis of language processing: From structure to function. Physiological Review 91: 1357–1392.
Friederici, A
1995The time course of syntactic activation during language processing: A model based on neuropsychological and neurophysiological data. Brain and Language 50(3): 259–281.
Friederici, A., Hahne, A. & Mecklinger, A
1996Temporal structure of syntactic parsing: Early and late event-related brain potential effects. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition 22: 1219–1248.
Grice, H
1975Logic and conversation. In Syntax and Semantic, 3: Speech Acts, P. Cole & J. Morgan (eds), 41–58. New York NY: Academic Press.
Hagoort, P
2005On broca, brain, and binding: a new framework, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9: 416–423.
Hagoort, P., Hald, L., Bastiaansen, M. & Peterson, K
2004Integration of word meaning and world knowledge in language comprehension. Science 5669: 438–441.
Hald, L., Steenbeek-Planting, E. & Hagoort, P
2007The interaction of discourse context and world knowledge in online sentence comprehension: Evidence from the N400. Brain Research 1146: 210–218.
Holtgraves, T
1986Language structure in social interaction: Perceptions of direct and indirect speech acts and interactants who use them. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 51: 305–314.
Holtgraves, T
1991Interpreting questions and replies: Effects of face-threat, question form, and gender. Social Psychology Quarterly 54: 15–24.
Holtgraves, T
2005Social psychology, cognitive psychology, and linguistic politeness. Journal of Politeness Research: Language, Behavior, Culture 1: 73–93.
Holtgraves, T. & Kashima, Y
2008Language, meaning, and social cognition. Personality and Social Psychology Review 12: 73–94.
Holtgraves, T. & Yang, J
1992Interpersonal underpinnings of request strategies: General principles and differences due to culture and gender. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 62: 246–256.
Hong, B
1985Politeness in Chinese: Impersonal pronouns and personal greetings. Anthropological Linguistics 27: 204–213.
Inui, K. & Osterhout, L
2005An ERP study of Japanese honorification: Are honorific features grammaticalized? Poster in the 18th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing.
Jang, S
2007Gender differences in strain, negative emotions, and coping behaviors: A general strain theory approach. Justice Quarterly 24: 523–553.
Jiang, X., Li, Y. & Zhou, X
2013aIs it over-respectful or disrespectful? Differential brain activities in perceiving pragmatic violation of social status information during utterance comprehension. Neuropsychologia 51: 2210–2223.
Jiang, X., Li, Y. & Zhou, X
2013bEven a rich man can afford that expensive house: ERP responses to construction-based pragmatic constraints during sentence comprehension. Neuropsychologia 51: 1857–1866.
Jiang, X., Tan, Y. & Zhou, X
2009Processing the universal quantifier during sentence comprehension: ERP evidence. Neuropsychologia 47: 1799–1815.
Jiang, X. & Zhou, X
2009Processing different levels of syntactic hierarchy: An ERP study on Chinese. Neuropsychologia 47: 1282–1293.
Jiang, X. & Zhou, X
2012Multiple semantic processes at different levels of syntactic hierarchy: Does higher-level semantic process proceed in the face of local semantic failure?Neuropsychologia 50: 1918–1928.
Kolk, H. & Chwilla, D
2007Late positivities in unusual situations. Brain and Language 100: 257–261.
Kotz, S. & Paulmann, S
2007When emotional prosody and semantics dance cheek to cheek: ERP evidence. Brain Research 1151: 107–118.
Kuperberg, G
2007Neural mechanisms of language comprehension: Challenges to syntax. Brain Research 1146: 23–49.
Kutas, M. & Federmeier, K
2011Thirty years and counting: Finding meaning in the N400 component of the event-related brain potential (ERP). Annual Review of Psychology 62: 621–647.
Kuo, S
2002From solidarity to antagonism: The uses of the second-person singular pronoun in Chinese political discourse. Text 22: 29–55.
Leech, G
1983Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman.
Lee-Wong, S.M
2000Politeness and face in Chinese culture. In Cross Cultural Communication, E. Hess-Lüttich & R. Watts (eds), 41–58. Bern: Peter Lang.
Leuthold, H., Filik, R., Murphy, K. & Mackenzie, G
In press. The online processing of socio-emotional information in prototypical scenarios: Inferences from brain potentials. Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.
Li, S., Jiang, X., Yu, H. & Zhou, X
In press. Cognitive empathy modulates the processing of pragmatic constraints during sentence comprehension. Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.
Macaulay, M
2001Tough talk: Indirectness and gender in requests for information. Journal of Pragmatics 33: 293–316.
Mao, Y
2003Yingxiang Hanyu Di’er Rencheng Shiyong de Shehui Wenhua Yinsu (Social and cultural factors in the use of second-person pronoun in Mandarin Chinese). MA dissertation, Beijing Language and Culture University.
McRae, K., Ochsner, K., Mauss, I., Gabrieli, J. & Gross, J
2008Gender Differences in Emotion Regulation: An fMRI Study of Cognitive Reappraisal. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations 11: 143–162.
Momo, K., Sakai, H. & Sakai, K
2008Syntax in a native language still continues to develop in adults: Honorification judgment in Japanese. Brain and Language 107: 81–89.
Nieuwland, M., Ditman, T. & Kuperberg, G
2010On the incrementality of pragmatic processing: An ERP investigation of informativeness and pragmatic abilities. Journal of Memory and Language 63: 324–346.
Osterhout, L., & Holcomb, P.J
1992Event-related brain potentials elicited by syntactic anomaly. Journal of Memory and Language 31(6): 785–806.
Pell, M., Paulmann, S., Dara, C., Alasseri, A., & Kotz, S
2009Factors in the recognition of vocally expressed emotions: A comparison of four languages. Journal of Phonetics 37: 417–435.
Politzer-Ahles, S., Fiorentino. R., Jiang, X., & Zhou, X
2013Event-related potential investigation of scalar implicature processing in Chinese using picture-sentence verification. Brain Research 1490: 134–152.
Regal, S., Coulson, S., & Gunter, T
2010The communicative style of a addresser can affect language comprehension? ERP evidence from the comprehension of irony. Brain Research 1311: 121–135.
Sakai, K
2005Language acquisition and brain development. Science 310: 815–819.
Saito, M., Kondo, N., Kondo, K., Ojima, T, & Hirai, H
2012Gender differences on the impacts of social exclusion on mortality among older Japanese: AGES cohort study. Social Science & Medicine 75: 940–945.
Steinhauer, K
2014Event-related potentials (ERPs) in second language research: A brief introduction to the technique, a selected review, and an invitation to reconsider critical periods in L2. Applied Linguistics 35: 393–417.
2003Generalized and particularized implicatures of politeness. In Perspectives on Dialogue in the New Millennium [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 114], P. Kuehnlein, H. Rieser & H. Zeevat (eds), 149–164. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Terkourafi, M
2005Pragmatic correlateds of frequency of use: the case for a notion of ‘minimal context.’ In Reviewing Linguistic Thought: Converging Trends for the 21st Century, S. Marmaridou, K. Nikiforidou & E. Antonopoulou (eds), 209–233. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Tesink, C., Petersson, K., Van Berkum, J., Van den Brink, D., Buitelaar, J. & Hagoort, P
2009Unification of speaker and meaning in language comprehension: An fMRI study. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 21: 2085–2099.
Van Berkum. J
2009The neuropragmatics of ‘simple’ utterance comprehension: An ERP review. In Semantics and Pragmatics: From Experiment to Theory, U. Sauerland & K. Yatsushiro (eds). Houndmills: Palgrave.
Van Berkum, J., Holleman, B., Nieuwland, M., Otten, M., & Murre, J
2009Right or wrong? The brain’s fast response to morally objectionable statements. Psychological Science 20: 1092–1099.
Van Berkum, J., Van den Brink, D., Tesink, C., Kos, M. & Hagoort, P
2008The neural integration of addresser and message. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 20: 580–591.
Van den Brink, D., Van Berkum, J., Bastiaansen, M., Tesink, C., Kos, M., Buitelaar, J. & Hagoort, P
2012Empathy matters: ERP evidence for inter-individual differences in social language processing. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 7: 173–183.
Wang, L., Ma, Q., Song, Z., Shi, Y., Wang, Y. & Pfotenhauer, L
2011N400 and the activation of prejudice against rural migrant workers in China. Brain Research 1375: 103–110.
White, K., Crites, S., Jr., Taylor, J. & Corral, G
2009Wait, what? Assessing stereotype incongruities using the N400 ERP component. Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 4: 191–198.
Yao, B, Belin, P., Scheepers, C
2011Silent reading of direct versus indirect speech activates voice-selective areas in the auditory cortex. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 23: 3146–3152.
Ye, Z., Luo, Y., Friederici, A., Zhou, X
2006Semantic and syntactic processing in Chinese sentence comprehension: Evidence from event-related potentials. Brain Research 1071 186–196.
Ye, Z., & Zhou, X
2008Involvement of cognitive control in sentence comprehension: Evidence from ERPs. Brain Research 1203: 103–115.
Ye, Z., & Zhou, X
2009Executive control in language processing. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 33: 1168–1177.
Young, A., Vance, C. & Ensher, E
2003Individual differences in sensitivity to disempowering acts: A comparison of gender and identity-based explanations for perceived offensiveness. Sex Roles 49: 163–171.
Zhou, X
2008Xiandai Hanyu Limao Yuyan Yanjiu (A study of politeness language in modern Chinese). Beijing: China Social Science Press.
Zhou, X., Jiang, X., Ye, Z., Zhang, Y., Lou, K. & Zhan, W
2010Semantic integration processes at different levels of syntactic hierarchy: An ERP study. Neuropsychologia 48: 1551–1562.
Zhu, M., Jiang, X. & Zhou, X
In preparation. When empathy intervenes: Processing linguistic and extra-linguistic agreement during utterance comprehension.
Cited by
Cited by 6 other publications
Cao, Ningning, Ling Zhou & Shaojie Zhang
2023. The Effects of Social Status and Imposition on the Comprehension of Refusals in Chinese: An ERP Study. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 52:6 ► pp. 1989 ff.
Ferguson, Heather J.
2024. Commentary on the special issue: new approaches to figurative language research. Discourse Processes► pp. 1 ff.
Holtgraves, Thomas & Jean-François Bonnefon
2017. Experimental Approaches to Linguistic (Im)politeness. In The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im)politeness, ► pp. 381 ff.
Jiang, Xiaoming
2017. Experimental Approaches to Socio‐Linguistics: Usage and Interpretation of Non‐Verbal and Verbal Expressions in Cross‐ Cultural Communication. In Sociolinguistics - Interdisciplinary Perspectives,
Jiang, Xiaoming & Xiaolin Zhou
2015. Who is respectful? Effects of social context and individual empathic ability on ambiguity resolution during utterance comprehension. Frontiers in Psychology 6
Vergis, Nikos, Xiaoming Jiang & Marc D. Pell
2020. Neural responses to interpersonal requests: Effects of imposition and vocally-expressed stance. Brain Research 1740 ► pp. 146855 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 19 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.