Subject/object processing asymmetries in Korean relative clauses: Evidence from ERP data.

Subject relative (SR) clauses have a reliable processing advantage in VO languages like English in which relative clauses (RCs) follow the head noun. The question is whether this is also routinely true of OV languages like Japanese and Korean, in which RCs precede the head noun. We conducted an event-related brain potential (ERP) study of Korean RCs to test whether the SR advantage manifests in brain responses as well, and to tease apart the typological factors that might contribute to them. Our results suggest that brain responses to RCs are remarkably similar in VO and OV languages, but that ordering of the RC and its head noun localizes the response to different sentence positions. Our results also suggest that marking the right edge of the RC in Chinese (Yang et al. 2010) and Korean and the absence of it in Japanese (Ueno & Garnsey 2008) affect the response to the following head noun. The consistent SR advantage found in ERP studies lends further support to a universal subject preference in the processing of relative clauses.

On the processing of Japanese wh-questions: an ERP study.

The processing of Japanese wh-questions was investigated using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Unlike in English or German, a wh-element in Japanese need not be displaced from its canonical position, but instead needs a corresponding Q(uestion)-particle to indicate its interrogative scope. We tested to see if there were any processing correlates specific to these features of Japanese wh-questions. Both mono-clausal and bi-clausal Japanese wh-questions elicited right-lateralized anterior negativity (RAN) between wh-words and corresponding Q-particles, relative to structurally-equivalent yes/no-question control conditions. These results suggest a reliable neural processing correlate of the dependency between wh-elements and Q-particles in Japanese, similar to effects of (left) anterior negativity between wh-fillers and gaps in English and German, but with a right- rather than left-lateralized distribution. It is suggested that wh-in-situ questions in Japanese are processed by the incremental formation of a long-distance dependency between wh-elements and their Q-particles, resulting in a working memory load for keeping track of scopeless wh-elements.

Violations of information structure: an electrophysiological study of answers to wh-questions.

This study investigates brain responses to violations of information structure in wh-question-answer pairs, with particular emphasis on violations of focus assignment in it-clefts (It was the queen that silenced the banker). Two types of ERP responses in answers to wh-questions were found. First, all words in the focus-marking (cleft) position elicited a large positivity (P3b) characteristic of sentence-final constituents, as did the final words of these sentences, which suggests that focused elements may trigger integration effects like those seen at sentence end. Second, the focusing of an inappropriate referent elicited a smaller, N400-like effect. The results show that comprehenders actively use structural focus cues and discourse-level restrictions during online sentence processing. These results, based on visual stimuli, were different from the brain response to auditory focus violations indicated by pitch-accent [Hruska, C., Steinhauer, K., Alter, K., & Steube, A. (2000). ERP effects of sentence accents and violations of the information structure. In Poster presented at the 13th annual CUNY conference on human sentence processing, San Diego, CA.], but similar to brain responses to newly introduced discourse referents [Bornkessel, I., Schlesewsky, M., & Friederici, A. (2003). Contextual information modulated initial processes of syntactic integration: the role of inter- versus intrasentential predictions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 29, 871-882.].

Event-related brain indices of Japanese scrambling.

This study examined the processing of Japanese wh-questions with preposed (scrambled) vs. in-situ (canonical SOV word order) wh-objects, and of yes/no-questions with scrambled vs. in-situ demonstrative objects. Questions with scrambled objects elicited bilateral slow anterior negative potentials between filler and gap. Scrambled demonstratives elicited P600 effects following the filler and (L)AN/P600 effects at the gap, while scrambled wh-words elicited primarily (L)AN effects at the gap. This replicated effects in response to filler-gap dependencies created by wh-movement in other languages, supporting the existence of universal parsing operations for all types of filler-gap dependencies. We suggest that these results are most generally compatible with notions of canonicity in sentence processing.