Online Processing of Temporal Agreement in a Grammatical Tone Language: An ERP Study

Frontiers in Psychology

Jacolien van Rij¹  Srđan Popov²  Roelien Bastiaanse³  Frank Tsiwah⁴ 

[1] Bernoulli Institute for Mathematics, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands;Center for Language and Cognition Groningen, University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands;Center for Language and Cognition Groningen, University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands;Center for Language and Brain, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia;Center for Language and Cognition Groningen, University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands;International Doctorate for Experimental Approaches to Language and Brain, University of Groningen, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom;

关键词: grammatical tone;    tense;    temporal agreement;    event-related potentials;    Akan;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2021.638716

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Previous electrophysiological studies that have examined temporal agreement violations in (Indo-European) languages that use grammatical affixes to mark time reference, have found a Left Anterior Negativity (LAN) and/or P600 ERP components, reflecting morpho-syntactic and syntactic processing, respectively. The current study investigates the electrophysiological processing of temporal relations in an African language (Akan) that uses grammatical tone, rather than morphological inflection, for time reference. Twenty-four native speakers of Akan listened to sentences with time reference violations. Our results demonstrate that a violation of a present context by a past verb yields a P600 time-locked to the verb. There was no such effect when a past context was violated by a present verb. In conclusion, while there are similarities in both Akan and Indo-European languages, as far as the modulation of the P600 effect is concerned, the nature of this effect seems to be different for these languages.

【 授权许可】

CC BY