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

Frontiers in Psychology

article

Frank Tsiwah¹  Roelien Bastiaanse¹  Jacolien van Rij⁴  Srđan Popov¹ 

[1] Center for Language and Cognition Groningen, University of Groningen;University of Groningen, United Kingdom;Center for Language and Brain, National Research University Higher School of Economics;Bernoulli Institute for Mathematics, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, University of Groningen

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

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2021.638716

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

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