On the universality of language comprehension strategies: Evidence from Turkish

A fundamental question in psycholinguistic research concerns the universality of comprehension strategies. We investigated this issue by examining the so-called “subject preference” in Turkish, a language which allows for a natural (unmarked) object reading of an initial ambiguous argument. Using ev...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Cognition 2008, Vol.106 (1), p.484-500
Main Authors: Demiral, Şükrü Barış, Schlesewsky, Matthias, Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, Ina
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Animacy
Biological and medical sciences
Cerebral Cortex - physiology
Comprehension
Comprehension - physiology
Cross-Cultural Comparison
Decision Making - physiology
Electroencephalography
Evoked Potentials - physiology
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Humans
Inferences
Language
Language comprehension
Linguistics
Male
Minimality
Miscellaneous
Psycholinguistics
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Reading
Semantics
Subject preference
Subject-object ambiguity
Turkish
Turkish language
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Summary:A fundamental question in psycholinguistic research concerns the universality of comprehension strategies. We investigated this issue by examining the so-called “subject preference” in Turkish, a language which allows for a natural (unmarked) object reading of an initial ambiguous argument. Using event-related brain potentials (ERPs), we observed increased processing difficulty in the form of a broadly distributed positivity when an initial ambiguous argument was disambiguated towards an object reading. This effect was independent of the animacy (i.e. semantic subject prototypicality) of the ambiguous argument. Our results therefore speak in favour of a universal tendency to interpret the first argument encountered as the “subject” of the clause, even in languages providing no obvious structural motivation for such a strategy. However, we argue that the underlying explanation for this preference must be modified in accordance with cross-linguistic considerations.
ISSN:0010-0277
1873-7838
DOI:10.1016/j.cognition.2007.01.008