Abstract: Objects in the world can be divided into animate and inanimate ones, according to their animacy. Different objects have different animacy hierarchy. From the evolutionary view, recognize living things quickly is important to us, thus, evolutionary pressure make our neural system to form different neural mechanism to animate and inanimate things. Evidence from brain-damaged patients and functional neuroimaging studies also indicates that human brain processing living things and non-living objects differently. Animacy category also reflect in our language system, express itself in most of world’s languages. Our language processing system not only use syntax and semantics but also use prominence information, such as animacy to construct sentence representation. In this paper, we will discuss the neural dynamic of animacy processing in sentence comprehension. In previous studies, many research use ERP techniques to investigate the role of animacy in sentence processing. Animacy affects argument and thematic processing. Generally, verb has selectional restrictions on its animacy of argument. According to previous research, animacy violation evoked P600 effects in some cases, but evoked N400 effects in other cases, in a few cases evoked biphasic N400/P600 effects. Animacy evoked P600 effects in most of thematic reversible sentences and evoked N400 effects in most of thematic irreversible sentences, animacy influence construction of thematic relationships. When the thematic role assigned by syntax conflict with the thematic role assigned by animacy information, it may lead to P600 effects. The role of animacy in sentence processing has been shown to be modulated by many other factors, such as sentence context, thematic reversibility, semantic relateness between arguments, verb types and its inherent thematic structure, among others. Animacy also influence prominence of argument to increase the degree of difficulty in thematic explanation, when the arguments in sentence have different animacy hierarchy, thematic role identification is facilitated. As a special semantic features, animacy may different from other semantic information. The paper also discuss animacy effects in complex sentences, animacy influence processing object relative clauses, the semantic relatedness of two NP in relative clause interact with animacy information. In the end, we make brief summary and give prospect of future study. Firstly, we proposed whether or not involve construction of verb-argument thematic relationship may determine neural dynamics of animacy processing. So, in the future, we can do some further studies to illuminate this problem. Secondly, we should consider how the individual difference of working memory span influence the processing of animacy and how these factors influence the mechanism of animacy processing in L1 and L2 language. In addition, according to previous research there is debate about the time course of the use of animacy information and how the animacy exerts an effect in sentence processing, we need to do further research with different language and other sentence structure to discuss this problem. The research on the mechanism of animacy in sentence processing may enrich and perfect the existing sentence processing model and make better understanding of cognitive neural mechanism in language processing.

Key words: animacy, argument, thematic structure, ERP, N400, P600, complex sentence, working memory

摘要： 生命性广泛地渗透到人类语言系统中发挥其作用。本文主要结合最新和经典的有关生命性的ERP研究探讨了生命性信息起作用的模式和时间进程。在句子加工过程中，生命性影响论元的加工并影响题元结构的建构和解释。以往研究表明，生命性违反有时引发的是N400效应，有时引发的是P600效应，少数情况还表现出N400-P600的双相模式。生命性在句子加工中的作用还跟多种变量存在交互作用，语境、题元可逆性、论元之间的语义关系、动词类型和其固有的题元结构都可能影响生命性信息其作用的模式。文章最后进行总结和展望，并提出未来研究仍有必要继续探讨生命性信息加工的时间神经动态性及其在句子加工中的具体作用机制。

关键词: 生命性, 论元, 题元结构, ERP, N400, P600, 复杂句子, 工作记忆