Frequency Sensitivity of Neural Responses to English Verb Argument Structure Violations

Collabra: Psychology

Ben Ambridge¹  Jona Sassenhagen²  Ryan Blything³  Elena Lieven⁵ 

[1] University of Liverpool, ESRC International Centre for Language and Communicative Development;Department of Cognitive Neuropsychology, University of Frankfurt;University of Bristol;University of Liverpool, ESRC International Centre for Language and Communicative Development;University of Manchester

关键词: Verb-argument structure overgeneralization;    Event Related Potentials;    Statistical-learning;    P600;    Left anterior negativity (LAN);   

DOI  :  10.1525/collabra.87

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: University of California Press

【 摘 要 】

How are verb-argument structure preferences acquired? Children typically receive very little negative evidence, raising the question of how they come to understand the restrictions on grammatical constructions. Statistical learning theories propose stochastic patterns in the input contain sufficient clues. For example, if a verb is very common, but never observed in transitive constructions, this would indicate that transitive usage of that verb is illegal. Ambridge et al. (2008) have shown that in offline grammaticality judgements of intransitive verbs used in transitive constructions, low-frequency verbs elicit higher acceptability ratings than high-frequency verbs, as predicted if relative frequency is a cue during statistical learning. Here, we investigate if the same pattern also emerges in on-line processing of English sentences. EEG was recorded while healthy adults listened to sentences featuring transitive uses of semantically matched verb pairs of differing frequencies. We replicate the finding of higher acceptabilities of transitive uses of low- vs. high-frequency intransitive verbs. Event-Related Potentials indicate a similar result: early electrophysiological signals distinguish between misuse of high- vs low-frequency verbs. This indicates online processing shows a similar sensitivity to frequency as off-line judgements, consistent with a parser that reflects an original acquisition of grammatical constructions via statistical cues. However, the nature of the observed neural responses was not of the expected, or an easily interpretable, form, motivating further work into neural correlates of online processing of syntactic constructions.

.

【 授权许可】

CC BY