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Abstract:
There is some debate in the literature regarding whether the
distance between two syntactically dependent elements affects
(re)processing difficulty. This issue was investigated, using the
P600 component as a tool. The P600 has been claimed to reflect
either repair/reanalysis difficulty, or syntactic integration
difficulty in general. In the present experiment, ERPs were
recorded while participants were reading adjunct clauses in which
subject and the verb were separated by either five words (two new
discourse referents) or two words (one new discourse referent); the
verb either agreed or did not agree with the subject. The distance
manipulation did not affect the P600 for either grammatical or
ungrammatical verbs. This supports Fodor & Inoue (1998), but is
somewhat problematic for models such as Gibson (1998), that is,
unless the P600 reflects difficulty due to the number of
simultaneous integrations, rather than distance.
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