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Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings

Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings

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In the same paragraph Hagoort et al. make difference between syntactic preferences and<br />

syntactic violations claiming that the violations elicit more posterior while syntactic<br />

preferences elicit more frontal distribution. The P600 elicited in the ‘case’ experiment<br />

shows both frontal and parietal distribution at different latencies. The frontal distribution<br />

shows clear left hemisphere maximum while the second part shows central distribution.<br />

While case violation can be easily related to the posterior part of the P600, in this<br />

experiment there is no difference in preferences between the conditions. There<strong>for</strong>e, the<br />

two phases in the P600 component could be interpreted in terms of violation only:<br />

constituent error, i.e. argument structure error detection, macrorole violation, i.e. syntax-<br />

to-semantics mapping and integration and repair. In such interpretation constituent<br />

structure error detection can be related to LAN, macrorole violation with the left anterior<br />

portion of P600 while repair and integration processes can be related to the second phase<br />

of the P600 component. This is, in a way, in accordance with Bornkessel & Schlesewsky<br />

(in press) in which they report an ‘early positivity’ and ‘P345’ <strong>for</strong> macrorole violation in<br />

German, Dutch and English (<strong>for</strong> example, in the German verb final sentences with object<br />

in the Dative as in …dass der Dirigent den Sängerinnen aufällt. The verb requires the<br />

Undergoer macrorole <strong>for</strong> the noun in Nominative and the initial macrorole assignment<br />

based on the Nom.–Dat., i.e. marked word order – Actor - should be changed, thus the<br />

increased processing costs occur). The difference in latency between the German<br />

examples and the results in the present study can be attributed to the difference in the<br />

availability of the macrorole in<strong>for</strong>mation; while in the German example the noun in<br />

Dative precedes the verb, in the present study the noun in the Dative was the very last<br />

word in the sentence. In the other words, in the German examples macroroles are already<br />

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