TY - JOUR
T1 - Neurophysiology of Hungarian subject-verb dependencies with varying intervening complexity
AU - Jolsvai, Hajnal
AU - Sussman, Elyse
AU - Csuhaj, Roland
AU - Csépe, Valéria
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by the Hungarian Research Fund , ( OTKA 47381 grant) and the National Institutes of Health (grant R01 DC004263 ). Many thanks to László Kálmán, Dr. Péter Rebrus, Viktor Trón, and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on a previous version of the manuscript. We are grateful to Bertalan Dankó for his technical help with analyzing the data and to Grace C. Sadia for her help with averaging the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th words. We are also grateful to Gabriella Baliga for her help with data collection. Request for reprints should be addressed to Hajnal Jolsvai, Cornell University, Psychology Department, 225 Uris Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca NY 14853–7601.
PY - 2011/12
Y1 - 2011/12
N2 - Non-adjacent dependencies are thought to be more costly to process than sentences wherein dependents immediately follow or precede what they depend on. In English locality effects have been revealed, while in languages with rich case marking (German and Hindi) sentence final structures show anti-locality-effects. The motivation of the current study is to test whether locality effects can be directly applied to a typologically different language than those investigated so far. Hungarian is a "topic prominent" language; it permits a variation of possible word sequencing for semantic reasons, including SVO word order. Hungarian also has a rich morphological system (e.g., rich case system) and postpositions to indicate grammatical functions. In the present ERP study, Hungarian subject-verb dependencies were compared by manipulating the mismatch of number agreement between the sentence's initial noun phrase and the sentence's final intransitive verb as well as the complexity of the intervening sentence material, interrupting the dependencies. Possible lexical class and frequency or cloze-probability effects for the first two words of the intervening sentence material were revealed when used separate baseline for each word, while at the third word of the intervening material as well as at the main verb ERPs were not modulated by complexity but at the verb ERPs were enhanced by grammaticality. Ungrammatical sentences enlarged the amplitude of both LAN and P600 components at the main verb. These results are in line with studies suggesting that the retrieval of the first element of a dependency is not influenced by distance from the second element, as the first element is directly accessible when needed for integration (e.g., McElree, 2000).
AB - Non-adjacent dependencies are thought to be more costly to process than sentences wherein dependents immediately follow or precede what they depend on. In English locality effects have been revealed, while in languages with rich case marking (German and Hindi) sentence final structures show anti-locality-effects. The motivation of the current study is to test whether locality effects can be directly applied to a typologically different language than those investigated so far. Hungarian is a "topic prominent" language; it permits a variation of possible word sequencing for semantic reasons, including SVO word order. Hungarian also has a rich morphological system (e.g., rich case system) and postpositions to indicate grammatical functions. In the present ERP study, Hungarian subject-verb dependencies were compared by manipulating the mismatch of number agreement between the sentence's initial noun phrase and the sentence's final intransitive verb as well as the complexity of the intervening sentence material, interrupting the dependencies. Possible lexical class and frequency or cloze-probability effects for the first two words of the intervening sentence material were revealed when used separate baseline for each word, while at the third word of the intervening material as well as at the main verb ERPs were not modulated by complexity but at the verb ERPs were enhanced by grammaticality. Ungrammatical sentences enlarged the amplitude of both LAN and P600 components at the main verb. These results are in line with studies suggesting that the retrieval of the first element of a dependency is not influenced by distance from the second element, as the first element is directly accessible when needed for integration (e.g., McElree, 2000).
KW - Anterior Negativity (LAN)
KW - Anti-locality effect
KW - ERP (Event-Related Potentials)
KW - Locality effect
KW - Nonadjacent dependency
KW - P600
KW - Sentence comprehension
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U2 - 10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2011.06.010
DO - 10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2011.06.010
M3 - Article
C2 - 21740931
AN - SCOPUS:82655181936
SN - 0167-8760
VL - 82
SP - 207
EP - 216
JO - International Journal of Psychophysiology
JF - International Journal of Psychophysiology
IS - 3
ER -