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Abstract:
Abstract: There is an ongoing debate in psycholinguistic
research about whether phrase structure information is processed
prior to or interactively with argument structure (e.g.,
transitivity) information of verbs during the earliest steps of
structure building (cf. Mitchell 1994). We addressed this issue by
using sentences with two different types of violations on the
identical item in the sentence (cf. Friederici, Steinhauer &
Frisch 1999). Sentences were either (a) correct, or realized (b) a
phrase-structure violation, (c) an argument structure violation or
(d) both types of violation simultanously. In two ERP studies
(visual versus auditory sentence presentation), we found a biphasic
N400-P600 pattern when there was an argument structure violation
but no additional phrase structure violation, that is, only in
condition (c). The patterns in the double violation condition (d)
and in condition (b) with a phrase structure violation only did not
differ from each other in either modality. Results show that phrase
structure information is processed prior to argument structure
information and therefore support phrase structure driven models of
parsing (cf. Frazier 1987).
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