Xinchi in Cognitive Science with Sebastián and Ellen

Shared neural responses to morphological and syntactic structure.

Now out in Cognitive Science, "Shared Neural Computations for Syntactic and Morphological Structures: Evidence From Mandarin Chinese," from Xinchi Yu *25 with co-authors Sebastián Mancha, Xing Tian and advisor Ellen Lau. The article, abstracted below, presents data which imply a shared neural response to sub- and supra-word structures, providing neurolinguistic support for a non-lexicalist view, on which these levels are not distinguished, except perhaps  morphophonologically. 

Xinchi left Maryland in 2025 with a PhD from the NACS program, supervised by Ellen Lau, with a thesis on "Mapping the neural taxonomy of mental objects in moment-to-moment cognition," Since then he has been in Lyon, France, working as a postdoc at the CNRS Institute of Cognitive Sciences Marc Jeannerod with Director of Research Liuba Papeo, on a project on the neural basis for long-term memory of social events, with on two years of funding from the Fyssen Foundation.

Although psycho-/neuro-linguistics has assumed a distinction between morphological and syntactic structure building as in traditional theoretical linguistics, this distinction has been increasingly challenged by theoretical linguists in recent years. Opposing a sharp, lexicalist distinction between morphology and syntax, non-lexicalist theories propose common morpho-syntactic structure-building operations that cut across the realms of “morphology” and “syntax,” which are considered distinct territories in lexicalist theories. Taking advantage of two pairs of contrasts in Mandarin Chinese with desirable linguistic properties, namely, compound versus simplex nouns (the “morphology” contrast, differing in morphological structure complexity per lexicalist theories) and separable versus inseparable verbs (the “syntax” contrast, differing in syntactic structure complexity per lexicalist theories), we report one of the first pieces of evidence for shared neural responses for morphological and syntactic structure complexity in language comprehension, supporting a non-lexicalist view where shared neural computations are employed across morpho-syntactic structure building. Specifically, we observed that the two contrasts both modulated neural responses in left anterior and centro-parietal electrodes in an a priori 275:400 ms time window, corroborated by topographical similarity analyses. These results serve as preliminary yet prima facie evidence toward shared neural computations across morphological and syntactic structure building in language comprehension.