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Abstract:
In contrast to English, morphological case is marked overtly
in German. This event-related brain potential (ERP) experiment
investigated effects of type of verb complement (accusative or
dative) on the processing of overtly accusative- or dative-marked
personal pronouns. The verbs, as the case assignor preceded the
personal pronoun which served as the object-NP, realizing a
case-violation between the case required by the verb (accusative or
dative) and the case-marking on the pronoun in half of the
sentences. The other half consisted of correct sentences. A
64-channel EEG was recorded while participants (N=16) read the 200
sentences in a word-by-word SVP setting at 500ms a word in a fully
counter-balanced design without fillers. Grammatical-acceptability
judgments were used to ensure sentence reading. The ERPs for the
case-marked pronouns revealed effects of case violations. In
contrast to the correct conditions, both syntactically incorrect
conditions elicited more negative-going wave forms in the time
window between 300 and 480 ms after stimulus onset, that were
broadly distributed and non-lateralized. Violations of the
accusative, linguistically labeled structural case, resulted in a
larger negativity at frontal sites than the dative, labeled
inherent case. There was no reliable P600 observed. Current
linguistic theories hold that structural cases are semantically
interpretable whereas inherent cases are not. The distributional
difference between the two linguistically distinct violation
conditions could indicate that different neural substrates are
involved.
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