@inproceedings{huang-etal-2026-traces,
    title = "Traces in the Brain: Neural Evidence for Syntactic Movement in {E}nglish and {C}hinese",
    author = "Huang, Yuhan  and
      Ma, Zhengwu  and
      Jin, Yuqi  and
      Chan, Beth  and
      Shen, Zheng  and
      Lai, Jackie Yan-Ki  and
      Hale, John T.  and
      Li, Jixing",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.1027/",
    pages = "20529--20543",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "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."
}