Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings

Figure 9. A mismatch on the constituent projection
In the non-violation condition the target word was in Accusative as required by the
constituent structure:
(20) Novin-e su jako hvalil-e izložb-u.
Newspaper-Nom.Pl. AUX strongly commend-Pres.3Pl. exibition-Acc.Sg.
'The newspaper strongly commended the exhibition.'
All target words were selected from the Croatian frequency dictionary (Moguš et al.,
1999) and fall into the frequency range from ≈2500 to ≈600 words in 1.000.000 words
(the most frequent words according to Moguš et al., 1999). All target words consist of
three syllables. Phonological difficulty was also accounted for in terms of absence of
consonant clusters longer than two phonemes. As the case is manipulated in the
experiment, the experiment will be referred to as the ‘case’ experiment.
The sentences were presented to the participants visually in a word-by-word manner.
Each word was in the middle of the 19’’ computer screen for 600 ms. Each word was
written in Times New Roman, the font size was 48 and its color was black. The
background was white. The participants were sitting at a distance of around 1 m from the
screen. The inter-stimulus interval (ISI) was 1100 ms (v. Figure 10).
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