Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings
Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings
Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings
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object). This constitutes the violation of the constituent projection of the sentence. The<br />
difference between the ‘case’ and this experiment is in its length. This experiment<br />
consists of three (phonological) words to make it more suitable <strong>for</strong> children and children<br />
with SLI. There<strong>for</strong>e, it will be referred to as the ‘case-chi’ experiment.<br />
All target words are of the similar (high) frequency according to the Croatian frequency<br />
dictionary (Moguš et al., 1999). In addition, since the target population of the experiment<br />
is children and children with SLI, all target words were checked against the Croatian<br />
child language corpus (Kovačević, http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/data/Slavic) and only the<br />
words that could be found there were taken <strong>for</strong> the stimuli.<br />
The stimulus sentences were presented visually, in a word-by-word manner. Each word<br />
was presented <strong>for</strong> 600 ms with the ISI of 1100 ms. The interval between the sentences<br />
was 1700 ms. After every 25-30 sentences a pause was inserted to allow participants<br />
more intensive blinking and head movements. The sequence file that contained all<br />
stimulus sentences was designed to allow <strong>for</strong> slowing down the procedure if necessary,<br />
i.e. if the children with SLI were not able to follow the sentences.<br />
Experiment 6. This experiment differs from the ‘tense’ experiment not only in its length,<br />
but also in the word order. While the stimulus sentences in the ‘tense’ experiment had S-<br />
Adv-O-V order (with the last word being the target word), in this experiment it was SVO,<br />
the canonical word order in Croatian. As mentioned above, the reason <strong>for</strong> this change is<br />
based on the previous knowledge about linguistic abilities of SLI children. The change of<br />
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