ERP Evidence for Case Marker Violation and Word-Order Canonicity using Microstate Analyses
-
1
Ewha Womans University, Republic of Korea
-
2
Department of Biomedical Engineering, College of Health Sciences, Yonsei University, Republic of Korea
Introduction. Critical linguistic features that affect sentence processing may vary across languages. In some languages such as English, word order plays a critical role to get information regarding thematic roles of the noun phrases (NPs) associated with the verb in a sentence. In contrast, some other languages such as Korean, Japanese and German have case marking systems that carry important sources of information for the thematic roles of the NPs. However, there are relatively few studies reporting event-related potentials (ERP) evidence regarding case marker processing (Bornkessel, Schlesewsky, & Friederici, 2002; Heffernan, Imanishi, & Honda, 2018; Mueller, Hahne, & Friederici, 2005; Mueller, Hirotani, & Friederici, 2007; Frisch, & Schlesewsky, 2005). The current study investigated whether syntactic violations induced by irrelevant case-marker assignment aligned with P600 effects in an SOV language (Subject-Object-Verb) and examined the source localization of the ERP components using microstate analyses.
Methods. Twenty-one healthy students (25.10±2.45 years old, 6 males) participated in the experiment. They had no history of neuropsychological disorders, normal vision and were right-handed Korean native speakers. The stimuli consisted of 180 Korean sentences with 80 target sentences and 100 filler sentences. Each sentence consisted of three phases such as a subject (NP1), an object (NP2)-where case marker violation occurred, and a verb. The experimental design contained two repeated-factors of case marker violation (violation vs. non-violation) and word order canonicity (canonical vs. non-canonical).
Results.
1. Temporal analyses for NP2 and Verb: For the NP2 phase at 550~900ms, a four-way repeated measures ANOVA (anteriority × laterality × violation × canonicity) revealed a significant three-way interaction of anteriority x laterality x violation [F(4,80)=8.705, p<0.001] due to the differential P600 amplitudes between violation and non-violation conditions at central and parietal regions.
For the verb phase at 200~300ms, there was a significant four-way interaction of anteriority x laterality x violation x canonicity [F(2.062,41.249)=25.907, p<0.001]. Differences in P200 amplitudes (red arrow in Figure 1 (a)) were observed depending on the presence of case marker violation at right frontal, central, and parietal regions. For verb phase at 300~900ms, we found significant interactions among anteriority x laterality x violation [F(4,80)=11.257, p<0.001] and among anteriority x laterality x canonicity [F(4,80)=5.425, p<0.001]. These effects were associated with significant differences in the violation condition that elicited late positive component (LPC, blue arrow in Figure 1 (a)) across the regions. However, there were no significant effects associated with canonicity.
2. Microstate analyses: We identified three major microstates from the clustering procedures. For the NP2 phase, state1 (~90 to 260ms) was associated with occipital and temporal regions and state2 (260-650ms) with visual regions across the conditions. State3 (650-900ms) was related to superior frontal region only for the non-violation condition. For the verb phase, state1 (~90 to 300ms) was associated with visual areas including inferior temporal region across the conditions. State2 (after 300ms) was identified in visual areas including inferior temporal region only for the non-violation condition, while state3 (after 300ms) in superior frontal and parietal regions was observed only for the violation condition.
Discussion. We found the classical P600 effects at the NP2 where case marker violations occurred, consistent with the previous findings from German and Japanese studies (Mueller, Hahne, & Friederici, 2005; Mueller, Hirotani, & Friederici, 2007; Frisch, & Schlesewsky, 2005). Additionally, we observed P200 and LPC effects for the violation condition at the verb phase where linguistic information was integrated. The microstate analyses indicate that the state1 in visual cortex and its association areas is related to the initial stage of visual word form analyses and state2 is associated with the activation of visual linguistic information. State3 in frontal and parietal regions seems to be responsible for the integration of higher-order cognitive-linguistic information.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2017R1A2B4006604).
References
Bornkessel, I., Schlesewsky, M., & Friederici, A. D. (2002). Grammar overrides frequency: Evidence from the online processing of flexible word order. Cognition, 85(2), B21-B30.
Heffernan, K., Imanishi, Y., & Honda, M. (2018). Showcasing the interaction of generative and emergent linguistic knowledge with case marker omission in spoken Japanese. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 3(1): 72. 1-24.
Mueller, J. L., Hahne, A., Fujii, Y., & Friederici, A. D. (2005). Native and nonnative speakers' processing of a miniature version of Japanese as revealed by ERPs. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 17(8), 1229-1244.
Mueller, J. L., Hirotani, M., & Friederici, A. D. (2007). ERP evidence for different strategies in the processing of case markers in native speakers and non-native learners. BMC Neuroscience, 8(1), 18-34.
Frisch, S., & Schlesewsky, M. (2005). The resolution of case conflicts from a neurophysiological perspective. Cognitive Brain Research, 25(2), 484-498.
Keywords:
Case-marker processing,
Verb-final language,
ERP,
Microstate Analyses,
P600,
P200,
late positive component
Conference:
Academy of Aphasia 57th Annual Meeting, Macau, Macao, SAR China, 27 Oct - 29 Oct, 2019.
Presentation Type:
Poster presentation
Topic:
Eligible for student award
Citation:
Sung
J,
Oh
S,
Jo
E and
Kim
K
(2019). ERP Evidence for Case Marker Violation and Word-Order Canonicity using Microstate Analyses.
Front. Hum. Neurosci.
Conference Abstract:
Academy of Aphasia 57th Annual Meeting.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2019.01.00077
Copyright:
The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers.
They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters.
The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated.
Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed.
For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions.
Received:
06 May 2019;
Published Online:
09 Oct 2019.
*
Correspondence:
Mx. Jee Eun Sung, Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Republic of Korea, jeesung@ewha.ac.kr