Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings

ms with 1100 ms ISI. The sentences were separated by an interval of 1700 ms. After each
20-25 sentences pauses were added to reduce fatigue and allow participants to blink
frequently or move. In both conditions the final words were equalized in terms of
frequency according to the Croatian frequency dictionary in the same way as in the 'case'
experiment (Moguš et al., 1999). They were also equalized in terms of number of
syllables and phonological difficulty (absence of consonant clusters longer than two
phonemes). The only difference between the ‘case’ and ‘tense’ experiment is the word
order. In the ‘tense’ experiment the word order is not canonical. This makes the stimulus
sentences more unnatural than the ‘case’ experiment sentences. However, relatively free
word order in Croatian in general and paying attention to the sentence focus (mainly by
the choice of the adverb) reduced this unnaturalness of the stimulus sentences. Again, the
participants were asked to make grammaticality judgments by pressing one of two
buttons on the response pad.
Experiment 3 ('gender'). This is an additional experiment aimed to show the difference in
language processing on a level lower than the sentence, i.e. on a noun phrase level. It
consists of 200 word pairs, adjectives and nouns (Adj. + N.). As adjectives have to agree
in gender with the nouns they modify, the violation in agreement simply consists of
mismatch between the gender of the adjective and the noun as in (23):
(23) mal-i kuć-a
small-Masc:Nom:Sg hause-Fem:Nom:Sg
‘small house’
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