The social hierarchical restrictions of Chinese verbs rapidly guide online thematic role assignment in comprehension.

The information about social hierarchical relationship has been intrinsically embedded into semantic restrictions of some Chinese verbs theoretically. For example, the Chinese verb ''(shanyang, support: provide for the needs and comfort of one's elders) only allows its Agent role to have a lower social status compared to the Patient role. However, whether this hierarchical restriction can be rapidly activated and how it impacts online thematic role assignment in reading remains to be seen. To answer this question, a 2 (Verb Type: hierarchical vs non-hierarchical verbs) × 2 (Social Hierarchy Sequence: match vs mismatch) design was constructed in the present study to investigate the interaction between the two factors. ERPs showed that hierarchical restriction violations evoked a stronger anterior negativity to the sentence-final noun (NP2). This effect was absent under two non-hierarchical conditions. To our knowledge, this study is the first to reveal that social hierarchical restrictions of Chinese hierarchical verbs can be rapidly available to guide online thematic role assignment and this process might be closely related to readers' thematic role knowledge.