Traces in the Brain: Neural Evidence for Syntactic Movement in English and Chinese

摘要

Syntactic movement is a core concept in generative linguistics to account for word-order variation and long-distance dependencies, but its psychological and neurobiological status remains debated. Here, we test the neural reality of movement in English and Chinese by correlating brain activity during naturalistic listening with syntactic node counts, traces and word embeddings derived from X-bar style tree annotations. We find that deep structure significantly predicts neural responses in English but not in Chinese, providing partial support for movement-based accounts while revealing clear cross-linguistic differences.