Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings
Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings
Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings
You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles
YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.
In Croatian adjectives usually precede the nouns; there<strong>for</strong>e nouns were chosen as the<br />
target words. They are all of the similar frequency (from ≈2500 to ≈600 in 1.000.000<br />
words, according to Moguš et al., 1999) and consist of two syllables. The stimuli were<br />
presented in a word-by-word manner, each word occurring <strong>for</strong> 600 ms with the 1100 ISI<br />
and 1700 ms between each noun phrase. After every 40-50 pairs a pause was inserted to<br />
allow participants more frequent blinking and head movements. As in the main<br />
experiments, the participants were asked to make grammaticality judgments by pressing<br />
one of two buttons on the response pad. Since the gender is manipulated in this<br />
experiment, it will be referred to as the ‘gender’ experiment. It should be mentioned that,<br />
strictly speaking, adjectives themselves are defined as operators in RRG; there<strong>for</strong>e, the<br />
structure of the NP that consists of an adjective and a noun would be represented as<br />
Figure 12. Layered structure of the noun phrase in RRG<br />
However, gender of the adjective defines its agreement with the noun and if two nouns<br />
and two adjectives are combined, it is the gender that tells us which adjective agrees with<br />
which noun thus defining the constituency. There<strong>for</strong>e, mismatch in gender is taken as a<br />
constituent error here. In addition, the newer versions of RRG (Van Valin, 2005) take<br />
adjectives to have analogous status to adverbs in the clause: they are periphery of the NP<br />
and thus belong to the constituent structure of the NP. Operators are now grammatical<br />
categories to which adjectives - as a lexical category - do not belong.<br />
74