ABSTRACT

This study investigated brain responses to verbal action mismatches (e.g. The brother catches/*bites the sister) and role relation mismatches (e.g. The sister catches the brother) in a picture-sentence verification task in Korean using event–related potentials (ERPs). EEG data collected from 30 native Korean speakers revealed a large N400 at the verb for the action mismatch, but an early negativity at the mismatched case-marker of the first NP as well as sustained negativity at the verb for the role mismatch. These results conform to the English-based data (i.e. Knoeferle et al., 2014. Different mechanisms for role relations versus verb–action congruence effects: Evidence from ERPs in picture–sentence verification. Acta Psychologica, 152, 133–148. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2014.08.004) in that the meaning of verb action and the thematic role relations involve different mechanisms in language comprehension. However, cross-lingustic differences were also found in terms of comprehenders’ relative sensitivity to different linguistic features in individual languages (e.g. word order in English and case-marking in Korean). Implications of the findings are discussed regrading predictive processing in language comprehension.

摘要

这项研究使用事件相关电位（ERP）在朝鲜语的图片句子验证任务中调查了大脑对言语动作不匹配（例如，兄弟抓住/ *咬住姐姐）和角色关系不匹配（例如，姐姐抓住兄弟）的反应。从30位韩语母语人士收集的EEG数据显示，动作不匹配的动词处有一个较大的N400，但第一个NP的大小写不匹配时，该词的早期为负，而角色不匹配的动词为该词的持续负。这些结果符合英语基础的数据（即Knoeferle等人，2014年不同的机制作用的关系与动词，行动的一致性效果：。在画面句子验证从ERP的证据心理学，152，133-148。https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2014.08.004），因为动词动作的含义和主题角色关系涉及语言理解的不同机制。但是，在理解者对单个语言中不同语言特征的相对敏感性方面也发现了跨语言的差异（例如英语中的单词顺序和韩文中的大小写标记）。讨论了这些发现的含义，以提高语言理解中的预测处理能力。