Každyj den’ turist *otdoxnul na pljaže. An event-related potentials study on the processing of aspectual violation in Russian iterative sentences

Abstract

The treatment of verbal aspect in Russian grammar and its interaction with lexical semantics are controversial matters. We address these issues from a psycholinguistic perspective. We conducted an EEG study with 14 native Russian speakers processing 160 sentences in the unrestrictedly iterative meaning; the sentences were either correct or contained semantic, morpho-syntactic, or aspectual violations (e.g., Každyj večer otec *zasnulpfvna divane. ‘Every evening the father *fell asleep on the sofa’). Processing the aspectual violation resulted in a P600, which is typical for processing morpho-syntactic violations and usually is interpreted as an index of difficulties in syntactic (re-)analysis, while an N400, which is typical for processing lexico-semantic violations, could not be observed. Our results show that Russian speakers must make more effort to analyze aspectually incorrect sentences compared with aspectually correct sentences. Processing aspectual violations in Russian clearly resembles processing of morpho-syntactic violations. This is in line with the interpretation of aspect as a typical grammatical category.