BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Hum. Neurosci.
Sec. Speech and Language
Volume 19 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2025.1632844
This article is part of the Research TopicWomen in speech and language 2025View all articles
Similar does not mean same: ERP correlates of processing mental and physical experiencer verbs in Malayalam complex constructions
Provisionally accepted
- 1Indian Institute of Technology Ropar, Rupnagar, India
- 2Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Max Planck Society, Frankfurt, Germany
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The present study examined the neurophysiological correlates of processing mental experiencer verbs and physical experiencer verbs in Malayalam complex constructions, in which the subject argument assumed the experiencer role. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded as twenty-eight first-language speakers of Malayalam read intransitive sentences with the two types of experiencer verbs. The subject case either matched (acceptable) or violated (unacceptable) the requirements of the verb in the critical stimuli. Both mental and physical experiencer verbs engendered negativity effects in the 400-600 ms time window when the subject case did not match the verb's requirements. Additionally, mental experiencer verbs evoked a LAN-like effect in the same time window regardless of grammaticality. Thus, even though both kinds of experiencer verbs are processed qualitatively similarly, inherent differences between mental and physical experiencer verbs in Malayalam persist and are discernible.
Keywords: Mental experiencer verb, Physical experiencer verb, N400, LAN, Malayalam
Received: 21 May 2025; Accepted: 21 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Shalu, Muralikrishnan and Choudhary. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: R. Muralikrishnan, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Max Planck Society, Frankfurt, Germany
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