Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings

Six ERP experiments were performed in order to gain insight into language
comprehension in Croatian in three groups of participants: adults, children with TLD and
children with SLI. Role and Reference Grammar distinction between constituent and
operator projection of a clause allowed for identification and characterization of the
linguistic processes that correspond to the electrophysiological effects obtained in the
experiments and enabled generalizations regarding syntactic or semantic nature of the
processes. While expectable LAN and P600 effect were obtained in the experiment in
which the case of the direct object was manipulated, in the experiment in which the tense
of the main verb was violated an unanticipated late negative deflection on the left frontal
electrodes was obtained. This late negativity was labeled N400’ since it reflects the
semantic processes related to the time of the event the sentence is about. The results do
not fit into serial models (although one such model, the eADM, is based on RRG), but
better fit to the immediacy models in which information is processed as soon as it
becomes available no matter whether it is syntactic or semantic in nature. In addition,
Croatian data fit into the recent results in sentence comprehension studies in which the
syntax-semantics dichotomy is blurred in a way, i.e. syntax related components were
obtained where the violation was not syntactic in nature. As in any language with rich
morphology, in Croatian case markers carry semantic information about thematic roles;
therefore, a grammatical violation triggers electrophysiological response that cannot be
simply regarded as ‘syntactic’.
Comparisons between adults and children with TLD reveal differences in
electrophysiological traces of sentence comprehension. These differences can be related
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