Neural correlates of semantic and syntactic processes in the comprehension of case marked pronouns: evidence from German and Dutch
Background: It is well known that both semantic and syntactic information play a role in pronoun resolution in sentences. However, it is unclear what the relative contribution of these sources of information is for the establishment of a coreferential relationship between the pronoun and the antecedent in combination with a local structural case constraint on the pronoun (i. e. case assignment of a pronoun under preposition governing). In a prepositional phrase in German and Dutch, it is the preposition that assigns case to the pronoun. Furthermore, in these languages different overtly case-ma... Mehr ...
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Dokumenttyp: | Artikel |
Erscheinungsdatum: | 2006 |
Reihe/Periodikum: | Lamers , M , Jansma-Schmitt , B M , Hammer , A & Münte , T F 2006 , ' Neural correlates of semantic and syntactic processes in the comprehension of case marked pronouns: evidence from German and Dutch ' , BMC Neuroscience , vol. 7 , pp. 23-23 . https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2202-7-23 |
Sprache: | Englisch |
Permalink: | https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-27440432 |
Datenquelle: | BASE; Originalkatalog |
Powered By: | BASE |
Link(s) : | https://cris.maastrichtuniversity.nl/en/publications/d17e1398-f469-4386-a956-4a6f43c5fc2b |
Background: It is well known that both semantic and syntactic information play a role in pronoun resolution in sentences. However, it is unclear what the relative contribution of these sources of information is for the establishment of a coreferential relationship between the pronoun and the antecedent in combination with a local structural case constraint on the pronoun (i. e. case assignment of a pronoun under preposition governing). In a prepositional phrase in German and Dutch, it is the preposition that assigns case to the pronoun. Furthermore, in these languages different overtly case-marked pronouns are used to refer to male and female persons. Thus, one can manipulate biological/syntactic gender features separately from case marking features. The major aim of this study was to determine what the influence of gender information in combination with a local structural case constraint is on the processing of a personal pronoun in a sentence. Event-related brain potential (ERP) experiments were performed in German and in Dutch. In a word by word sentence reading study in German and Dutch, gender congruency between the antecedent and the pronoun was manipulated and/or case assignment by the preposition was violated while ERPs of young native speakers were recorded. Results: The German and the Dutch ERP data showed an enlarged negativity broadly distributed starting approximately 350 ms after onset of the pronoun followed by a late positivity for gender violations. For syntactic incongruencies without gender violations only a positivity was present. The Dutch data showed an earlier onset of the positivity in comparison to German. Conclusion: Finding negativities and positivities for conditions with a gender violation indicates that pronoun resolution with gender incongruency between the pronoun and the antecedent suffers from semantic as well as syntactic integration problems. The presence of a positivity for the syntactically incongruent conditions without gender violations suggests that the processing of ...