Decomposing animacy reversals between agents and experiencers: an ERP study

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Computational Linguistics

Background:

• Thematic reversal anomalies in sentences can elicit distinct event-related potential (ERP) effects, primarily the N400 or semantic-P600 (sP600).
• Previous research suggests these ERP differences might relate to verb types, specifically Agent-Subject Verbs (ASVs) and Experiencer-Subject Verbs (ESVs).

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if distinct ERP profiles differentiate aspectual-thematic structures between ASVs and ESVs in English.
• To refine hypotheses on thematic reversal anomalies and their underlying neural mechanisms.

Main Methods:

• Examined ERP responses to thematic reversal anomalies created by inanimate subject noun phrases in both ASV and ESV constructions.
• Controlled for animacy-based prominence and semantic association to isolate ERP effects.
• Analyzed the presence and characteristics of N400 and sP600 effects in response to target verbs.

Main Results:

• Thematic reversal anomalies elicited an N400 effect specifically for ESVs, but not for ASVs.
• This differential N400 finding supports the hypothesis of distinct aspectual-thematic structures between ESVs and ASVs.
• The results indicate that language typology alone does not fully explain the presence or absence of N400s in such anomalies.

Conclusions:

• English ESVs exhibit a distinct aspectual-thematic structure compared to ASVs, reflected in their unique ERP profiles.
• The N400 effect in ESV anomalies challenges previous claims that N400s are absent in English for this type of anomaly.
• These findings contribute to a nuanced understanding of semantic processing and thematic roles in sentence comprehension across languages.