Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings

data collected within a group of adult Croatian speakers are compared in the two main
and two additional experiments in order to find the differences between the two kinds of
syntactic processes on the different projections of the clause. In the remaining two
experiments a between-group design was applied in order to find differences between the
three groups of participants.
4.2.2. The first group of experiments
Experiment 1('case'). The experiment consists of 200 four-word sentences (phonological
word, as explained below) with a target word in the final position in the sentence. All
sentences are built around a transitive verb that requires an argument in Accusative (i.e.
all verbs are, in RRG concepts, M-transitive - they have actor and undergoer arguments).
In half of the sentences (i.e. in the violation condition) the last word, a noun, was put in
the wrong case, the Dative as in the following glossed example taken from the stimulus
sentences:
(19) Učenik-Ø je lani pročita-o lektir-i.
Pupil-Nom.Sg. AUX last year read-masc.sg reading-Dat.Sg.
‘The pupil has read the reading last year.’
Figure 9 shows how Dative instead of Accusative violates the constituent projection of
the clause.
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