Forum: Gsurc 2013 Title: Interactions between Lexical and Syntactic Knowledge during Incremental Processing of the Causative Construction in English
نویسنده
چکیده
Introduction: We examine event-related potential (ERP) responses during comprehension of the Causative construction. Event-related potentials are brain-responses that are directly-correlated to cognitive or sensory event. Both the P600 and N400 are ERPs that respectively correlate to syntactic and semantic anomalies when participants are processing presented sentences. A construction is a mapping between sentential form (syntax) and meaning. The English Causative is syntactically specified as 'NP-V-NP-PP', and means 'Someone-CAUSED-SomethingtoChangeLocation'. Importantly, only certain verbs are permitted within this construction: e.g., “walk” is allowed ("Jack walked his sister to the party"), but “arrive” is not (*"Jack arrived his sister to the party"). Our goal was to test whether word-to-construction mismatches would elicit semantic or syntactic ERP effects, or both. Particularly we sought to test whether syntax-first theories are viable in relation to construction grammar theories. Syntax-first theories hold that once a syntactic error is recognized all further processing ceases. Construction grammar theories hold that sentence processing is ongoing and thus are in direct contrast to syntax-first theories
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