Short Communication: Event-related brain potential evidence for animacy processing asymmetries during sentence comprehension  

Oleh:

Nieuwland, Mante S. ; Martin, Andrea E. ; Carreiras, Manuel

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Brain and Language (Full Text) vol. 126 no. 2 (2013), page 151-158.
Topik: Sentence comprehension; Electrophysiology; Animacy; Case; Differential object marking; Spanish; Event-related potentials; N400; P600
Fulltext: 126_02_Nieuwland.pdf (816.71KB)

Isi artikel

The animacy distinction is deeply rooted in the language faculty. A key example is differential object marking, the phenomenon where animate sentential objects receive specific marking. We used eventrelated potentials to examine the neural processing consequences of case-marking violations on animate and inanimate direct objects in Spanish. Inanimate objects with incorrect prepositional case marker ‘a’ (‘al suelo’) elicited a P600 effect compared to unmarked objects, consistent with previous literature. However, animate objects without the required prepositional case marker (‘el obispo’) only elicited an N400 effect compared to marked objects. This novel finding, an exclusive N400 modulation by a straightforward grammatical rule violation, does not follow from extant neurocognitive models of sentence processing, and mirrors unexpected ‘‘semantic P600’’ effects for thematically problematic sentences. These results may reflect animacy asymmetry in competition for argument prominence: following the article, thematic interpretation difficulties are elicited only by unexpectedly animate objects.

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