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Abstract:
It is well known from the literature that speakers of German
exhibit a subject-before-object preference for temporarily
ambiguous arguments and that non-preferred disambiguations lead to
late positivity effects in event-related potentials (ERP). Although
subject-preference effects have proved to be resistant against
different kinds of non-syntactic influences, a syntactic mechanism
has been identified according to which coreferent elements (like a
pronoun and its antecedent) are preferentially interpreted as
having the same syntactic function. In an ERP study using the
traditional voltage average technique as well as symbolic dynamics,
we investigated whether such a mechanism is able to attenuate or
even reverse the subject preference and thereby to modulate the
neurophysiological correlates for garden-path recovery. We found
that a subject preference can be turned into an object preference
when the antecedent of an ambiguous pronoun has the grammatical
function of object rather than subject. In this case, a later
disambiguation of the pronoun towards a subject interpretation
leads to a P350 component in the voltage averages and to an entropy
decrease in symbolic dynamics in a similar time range compared to a
disambiguation towards subject.
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