Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings

5.3. General Discussion
5.3.1. Sentence comprehension in adults
The four experiments on adult Croatian speakers show that syntactic processing is not a
unique process. It can be dissociated to other, more elementary processes that contribute
to the building of the sentence structure and its interpretation. In this study this
dissociation is defined in terms of the Role and Reference Grammar. According to this
linguistic theory it is claimed that the elements of the operator projection are ‘quite
different from predicates and their arguments’ (Van Valin, LaPolla, 1997:40).
Electrophysiological results confirm this claim corroborating the idea that this linguistic
theory can be taken as a processing model, as well. However, as the obtained results
reveal, the electrophysiological trace of processing the data represented on the operator
projection does not reveal a new syntax-related component, but indicates processes that
are related to the integration of a part of sentence meaning, i.e. the point in time at which
the action occurs (the difference can be characterized as a difference within a component,
as the label N400’ suggests. This label emphasizes the functional side of the obtained
component, i.e. semantic processing). It can be suggested that in order to explain these
results, RRG - taken as a processing model - should be extended with another kind of
syntax-to-semantics mapping in which elements of the operator projection would be
mapped into a set of relations defined by philosophical logic (Van Benthem, 2002), as
suggested above. In other words, it is not just the argument structure that is reconstructed
in the sentence comprehension, but also temporal or spatial relations, speaker’s beliefs or
probability of the action described in a sentence. A prediction can be made: in languages
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