Processing of temporary syntactic ambiguity in Italian “who”-questions: a study with event-related potentials

This study investigated the processing of direct Italian “who”-questions, containing a temporary ambiguity of the syntactic role (subject/object) of the initial pronoun. To this aim we measured event-related potentials (ERPs) evoked by the disambiguating verbal agreement word and by the following on...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Neuroscience letters 2005-03, Vol.377 (2), p.91-96
Main Authors: Penolazzi, Barbara, Vincenzi, Marica De, Angrilli, Alessandro, Job, Remo
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Analysis of Variance
Biological and medical sciences
Event-related potentials
Evoked Potentials - physiology
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Humans
Language
Language processing
Male
Multilingualism
P300
P600
Reading
Semantics
Syntactic ambiguity
Time Factors
Vertebrates: nervous system and sense organs
Who-questions
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Summary:This study investigated the processing of direct Italian “who”-questions, containing a temporary ambiguity of the syntactic role (subject/object) of the initial pronoun. To this aim we measured event-related potentials (ERPs) evoked by the disambiguating verbal agreement word and by the following ones. Results showed two positive deflections, corresponding to a P300 and to a P600, only at the target verb of the object-first extraction, the condition which has been demonstrated to be less preferred by speakers. The functional meaning of this positive complex, similar to patterns already reported for German subject/object ambiguous relative clauses, was discussed with reference both to results obtained in other languages using similar sentences and to psycholinguistic parsing models.
ISSN:0304-3940
1872-7972
DOI:10.1016/j.neulet.2004.11.074