Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings

Experiment 4 ('quantifier'). The experiment consists of 200 word pairs and each pair
consists of a cardinal number and a noun (Num. + N.). In 100 pairs the number precedes
a countable noun (e.g. stolac ‘chair’ or šljiva ‘plum’) and in 100 pairs the number
precedes a mass noun (i.e. an uncountable noun such as meso ‘meat’ or voće ‘fruit’). This
constitutes the non-violation and violation condition, respectively. In this experiment the
quantifying of the noun is manipulated; therefore, the experiment will be referred to as
the ‘quantifier’ experiment. Since quantifiers are represented on the operator projection
in RRG, a noun phrase in which a cardinal number precedes an uncountable noun
contains a violation that can be traced to the operator projection of the NP.
All nouns consisted of two syllables and were chosen on the basis of their frequency
(according to Moguš et al., 1999). The numbers were all monosyllabic (dva ‘two’, tri
‘three’, pet ‘five’ and šest ‘six’. The stimuli were presented visually, in a word-by-word
manner. The numbers were presented in letters. Each word was on the computer screen
for 600 ms and the ISI was 1100 ms. The pairs were separated by 1700 ms interval. After
each 40-50 pairs a pause was inserted to allow participants a short brake. The participants
had to make the grammaticality judgment by pressing one of two buttons on the response
pad after the second word (the noun).
4.2.3. The second group of experiments
Experiment 5. This experiment is very similar to the ‘case’ experiment. It consists of 200
SVO sentences out of which 100 contain the target word in the wrong case (Dative
instead of Accusative). The target word was the last word in the sentence (the direct
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