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Chapter 5 - Word Order Preference in Sentence Comprehension III: ERP Studies without Context

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 January 2023

Masatoshi Koizumi
Affiliation:
Tohoku University, Japan
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Summary

Chapter 5 investigates the time course of the processing of Kaqchikel sentences with alternative word orders. A sentence–picture matching task was employed in an experiment measuring event-related potentials (ERPs). In this experiment, a Kaqchikel sentence was presented aurally through a headset; afterwards, a picture was presented in the center of a screen, either matching the event described by the preceding sentence or not. Upon seeing the picture, the participants were asked to judge whether the picture was congruent with the sentence. The target sentences used in this experiment were all transitive, with thematically reversible agents and patients, arranged into four word orders: VOS, VSO, SVO, and OVS. A late positive ERP component called P600 was used to examine processing loads, as P600 has been found to be elicited by sentences with a filler-gap dependency, reflecting an increased syntactic processing cost. The results of the two experiments demonstrated that SVO elicited a greater positivity (P600) than VOS, and that VSO elicited a similar posterior positivity, relative to VOS. This range of properties follows naturally from the combination of the IGV and the syntactic structures of Kaqchikel transitive sentences given in Chapter 2.

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Constituent Order in Language and Thought
A Case Study in Field-Based Psycholinguistics
, pp. 49 - 60
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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