Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings

In Croatian adjectives usually precede the nouns; therefore nouns were chosen as the
target words. They are all of the similar frequency (from ≈2500 to ≈600 in 1.000.000
words, according to Moguš et al., 1999) and consist of two syllables. The stimuli were
presented in a word-by-word manner, each word occurring for 600 ms with the 1100 ISI
and 1700 ms between each noun phrase. After every 40-50 pairs a pause was inserted to
allow participants more frequent blinking and head movements. As in the main
experiments, the participants were asked to make grammaticality judgments by pressing
one of two buttons on the response pad. Since the gender is manipulated in this
experiment, it will be referred to as the ‘gender’ experiment. It should be mentioned that,
strictly speaking, adjectives themselves are defined as operators in RRG; therefore, the
structure of the NP that consists of an adjective and a noun would be represented as
Figure 12. Layered structure of the noun phrase in RRG
However, gender of the adjective defines its agreement with the noun and if two nouns
and two adjectives are combined, it is the gender that tells us which adjective agrees with
which noun thus defining the constituency. Therefore, mismatch in gender is taken as a
constituent error here. In addition, the newer versions of RRG (Van Valin, 2005) take
adjectives to have analogous status to adverbs in the clause: they are periphery of the NP
and thus belong to the constituent structure of the NP. Operators are now grammatical
categories to which adjectives - as a lexical category - do not belong.
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