Philipp, Markus, Graf, Tim, Kretzschmar, Franziska and Primus, Beatrice (2017). Beyond Verb Meaning: Experimental Evidence for Incremental Processing of Semantic Roles and Event Structure. Front. Psychol., 8. LAUSANNE: FRONTIERS MEDIA SA. ISSN 1664-1078

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Abstract

We present an event-related potentials (ERP) study that addresses the question of how pieces of information pertaining to semantic roles and event structure interact with each other and with the verb's meaning. Specifically, our study investigates German verb-final clauses with verbs of motion such as fliegen 'fly' and schweben 'float, hover,' which are indeterminate with respect to agentivity and event structure. Agentivity was tested by manipulating the animacy of the subject noun phrase and event structure by selecting a goal adverbial, which makes the event telic, or a locative adverbial, which leads to an atelic reading. On the clause-initial subject, inanimates evoked an N400 effect vis-a-vis animates. On the adverbial phrase in the atelic (locative) condition, inanimates showed an N400 in comparison to animates. The telic (goal) condition exhibited a similar amplitude like the inanimate-atelic condition. Finally, at the verbal lexeme, the inanimate condition elicited an N400 effect against the animate condition in the telic (goal) contexts. In the atelic (locative) condition, items with animates evoked an N400 effect compared to inanimates. The combined set of findings suggest that clause-initial animacy is not sufficient for agent identification in German, which seems to be completed only at the verbal lexeme in our experiment. Here non-agents (inanimates) changing their location in a goal-directed way and agents (animates) lacking this property are dispreferred and this challenges the assumption that change of (locational) state is generally a defining characteristic of the patient role. Besides this main finding that sheds new light on role prototypicality, our data seem to indicate effects that, in our view, are related to complexity, i.e., minimality. Inanimate subjects or goal arguments increase processing costs since they have role or event structure restrictions that animate subjects or locative modifiers lack.

Item Type: Journal Article
Creators:
CreatorsEmailORCIDORCID Put Code
Philipp, MarkusUNSPECIFIEDUNSPECIFIEDUNSPECIFIED
Graf, TimUNSPECIFIEDUNSPECIFIEDUNSPECIFIED
Kretzschmar, FranziskaUNSPECIFIEDUNSPECIFIEDUNSPECIFIED
Primus, BeatriceUNSPECIFIEDUNSPECIFIEDUNSPECIFIED
URN: urn:nbn:de:hbz:38-213868
DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01806
Journal or Publication Title: Front. Psychol.
Volume: 8
Date: 2017
Publisher: FRONTIERS MEDIA SA
Place of Publication: LAUSANNE
ISSN: 1664-1078
Language: English
Faculty: Unspecified
Divisions: Unspecified
Subjects: no entry
Uncontrolled Keywords:
KeywordsLanguage
LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION; FRACTIONATING LANGUAGE; ANIMACY; INTEGRATION; KNOWLEDGE; SENTENCES; GERMAN; ERPSMultiple languages
Psychology, MultidisciplinaryMultiple languages
Refereed: Yes
URI: http://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/id/eprint/21386

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