Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings

semantics distinction more relative (Kuperberg et al., 2006, Kemmerer et al., in press,
Kim & Osterhout, 2005).
There are two points that are common in the two experiments, ‘tense’ and ‘quantifier’
experiments. First, it is the operator projection that has been manipulated. Second, they
elicit a negative deflection, in the ‘quantifier’ case a classic N400 and in the ‘tense’
experiment some sort of late slow negative wave. The relation between N400 and
semantics is widely known whether it is the integration of a word into the sentence
context as in Kutas & Hilliard (1980), semantic priming as e.g. in Krehera et al. (2006) or
lexical decision task as e.g. in Bentin et al. (1985). In the ‘quantifier’ experiment the
meaning of the NP cannot be integrated if the preceding number makes no sense with the
mass noun, i.e. the quantity of the entity such as water or flower cannot be determined. If
we make an analogy (as schematically shown on Figure 32), we can interpret ‘tense’
experiment results as a difficulty in the integration of a part of the sentence meaning, i.e.
a difficulty in determining the time of the event described in the sentence.
Figure 32. The interpretation of the ‘quantifier’ and ‘tense’ experiments
This interpretation raises additional questions regarding RRG: if linguistic traits
represented on the operator projection elicit semantics-related electrophysiological
effects, is there a different syntax-to-semantics linking that maps elements of the operator
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