The role of prominence in Spanish sentence comprehension: An ERP study

GATTEI, CAROLINA; TABULLO, ÁNGEL; WAINSELBOIM, ALEJANDRO; PARÍS, LUIS

BRAIN AND LANGUAGE

ACADEMIC PRESS INC ELSEVIER SCIENCE

Lugar: Amsterdam; Año: 2015 vol. 150 p. 22 - 35

0093-934X

Prominence is the hierarchical relation among arguments that allows us to understand ?Who did what towhom? in a sentence. The present study aimed to provide evidence about the role of prominence informationfor the incremental interpretation of arguments in Spanish. We investigated the time course ofneural correlates associated to the comprehension of sentences that require a reversal of argumentprominence hierarchization. We also studied how the amount of available prominence informationmay affect the incremental build-up of verbal expectations. Results of the ERP data revealed that atthe disambiguating verb region, object-initial sentences (only one argument available) elicited acentro-parietal negativity with a peak at 400 ms post-onset. Subject-initial sentences (two argumentsavailable) yielded a broadly distributed positivity at around 650 ms. This dissociation suggests that argumentinterpretation may depend on their morphosyntactic features, and also on the amount of prominenceinformation available before the verb is encountered.