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Abstract:
This study explores the comprehension of German verbs by
violating their form differently. A German complex verb like
"anrufen" ("to call in") must occur separated when inserted in the
second position in a sentence, "er ruft jemanden an" ("he calls
sbd.in"). The assumption was that the violation of this
requirement, e.g. "er anruft" ("he incalls"), would result in a
lexico-morphological inappropriate verb form. This was contrasted
with another type of inappropriate verb form which is a
subject-verb agreement violation, eg. "er rufen" ("he call") being
morpho-syntactic in nature. The hypothesis that both violations
were different was tested by using the method of event related
brain potentials (ERP). The result of our study is that both types
of violation elicited a positive component around 600 milliseconds
after the verb onset. The fact that there are no different brain
responses between these violations as reflected by ERP measurement
leads us to the following conclusion: The P600 seems to represent a
general process reflecting the attempt of the comprehension system
to find a grammatical interpretation for different types of
inappropriate linguistic input.
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