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Published on: October 25, 2019
ERP evidence for telicity effects on syntactic processing in garden-path sentences
Evguenia Malaia1, Ronnie B Wilbur, Christine Weber-Fox
1Purdue University, Department of Speech, Language, & Hearing Sciences, Heavilon Hall, 500 Oval Drive, West Lafayette, IN 47907-2038, USA. emalaya@purdue.edu
Verb telicity impacts sentence processing. High proficiency readers show earlier brain signal divergence for atelic verbs, suggesting semantic distinctions influence syntactic re-analysis.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Linguistics
Background:
- Verbs encode semantic information about actions and their argument structures.
- Linguistic theory categorizes verbs as telic (with an endpoint) or atelic (without an endpoint).
- Understanding how this verb distinction affects language processing is crucial.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the influence of verbal telicity on online sentence processing.
- To examine the effect of verbal telicity on the syntactic re-analysis of object-reduced relative clauses.
- To explore how syntactic proficiency modulates the processing of verb telicity.
Main Methods:
- Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 22 English speakers.
- Participants read sentences containing either telic or atelic verbs.
- ERPs were analyzed for verbs, prepositions ('by'), and agent arguments, comparing normal and high syntactic proficiency groups.
Main Results:
- Normal proficiency (NP) group: ERPs diverged at the second argument; atelic verbs elicited greater N100/P200 negativity.
- High proficiency (HP) group: ERPs diverged earlier at 'by'; atelic verbs showed increased P200 and anterior negativity.
- These findings indicate that verb semantics and syntactic proficiency influence online sentence structure processing.
Conclusions:
- The study supports the conceptual/semantic distinction between telic and atelic verbs.
- World knowledge about verb-designated actions significantly impacts sentence processing.
- Syntactic proficiency plays a key role in how these semantic distinctions are reflected in online processing.
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