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Abstract:
Whereas most psycholinguistic studies are based on behavioral
data, I will argue that "event-related brain potentials" (ERP) open
up new perspectives for many of these theories. As an example, I
will show that recent theories of case processing must be
fundamentally revised if the results obtained from classical
psycholinguistic methods are compared with the patterns found in
ERP measures. Thus, I will argue that only a combination of
classical methods and brain studies can enable us to gain a more
fine-grained understanding of basic processes of sentence
comprehension. Further evidence for such a claim comes from a
crosslinguistic comparison of sentences involving a case violation.
A contrast in ERP recordings between English and German indicates
that the sources of case information (morphological vs. structural)
differ between languages, a finding with far-reaching implications
for all related theories.
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