Think globally: Cross-linguistic variation in electrophysiological activity during sentence comprehension

Cross-linguistic psycholinguistics and its critical role in theory development: early beginnings and recent advances

“…Bornkessel-Schlesewksy and colleagues's work in the domain of "neurotypology" is an excellent example of a recent psycholinguistic research program with an explicitly cross-linguistic focus; see e.g., Bornkessel & Schlesewsky, 2006BornkesselSchlesewsky & Schlesewsky, 2013;BornkesselSchlesewsky et al, 2011). For general reviews covering various theoretical and methodological approaches see Bates, Devescovi, & Wulfeck, 2001;Bornkessel & Schlesewsky, 2006;Bornkessel-Schlesewsky et al, 2011;Lago, 2014;Thornton, MacDonald, & Gil, 1999. Perhaps inevitably, production research has lagged behind comprehension research in this regard.…”

Processing flexible form-to-meaning mappings: Evidence for enriched composition as opposed to indeterminacy

“…Whereas the former fits well with a well-formedness-based interpretation of the late positivity (e.g. in terms of well-formedness categorisation as suggested by Bornkessel & Schlesewsky, 2006;Bornkessel-Schlesewsky et al, 2011;Kretzschmar, 2010 or in terms of conflict monitoring as argued, for example, by Kolk et al, 2003, andvan de Meerendonk et al, 2010), 11 the latter is highly suggestive of a coercion-based interpretation (recall from the introduction that the successful application of coercion should result in higher rather than lower acceptability on a single trial basis). This pattern of results thus provides compelling evidence in favour of two qualitatively distinct late positive effects (see Bornkessel & Schlesewsky, 2006, for the prediction that two such effects should exist, though there was no clear-cut empirical evidence for this at the time).…”

“…linking classes with particular aspectual properties) rather than the preactivation of individual words (for evidence of N400 modulations linked to the anticipation of particular verb classes, see Bornkessel-Schlesewsky & Schlesewsky, 2008b). 9 Furthermore, and in line with previous results, we assume that the late positivity reflects a categorisation process by means of which the sentences with a dispreferred auxiliary are classified as ill-formed (Bornkessel & Schlesewsky, 2006;Bornkessel-Schlesewsky et al, 2011;Kretzschmar, 2010). An anonymous reviewer suggests an alternative interpretation of the late positivity in terms of reanalysis processes.…”

“…Thus, N400 modulations were predicted both from the perspective of lexical preactivation (or the absence of it) and with regard to linking requirements. We additionally expected to observe late positivity effects for violations versus controls, since these typically occur in unacceptable sentences (particularly in experiments employing an acceptability judgement task), possibly reflecting well-formedness categorisation (Frenzel, Schlesewsky, & Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, 2011;Bornkessel-Schlesewsky et al, 2011) or ''conflict monitoring'' (Kolk, Chwilla, van Herten, & Oor, 2003;van de Meerendonk, Kolk, Vissers, & Chwilla, 2010, among others).…”

Effects of Subject-Case Marking on Agreement Processing: ERP evidence from Basque

“…Therefore, the present study will capitalize on the presence of multiple verb agreement and the case system in Basque to examine whether and how the processing of S-V agreement may differ between transitive and intransitive sentences. This study adds to the growing body of research that draws on findings from a typologically diverse set of languages to inform the cognitive neuroscience of language (e.g., Bornkessel-Schlesewsky et al, 2011), as Basque is an SOV ergative casemarking language with a rich system of agreement on the auxiliary, all of which place it in stark contrast to languages such as English.…”