0000000000115054
AUTHOR
Adrian Staub
The Timecourse of Sentence Processing in the Brain
This chapter discusses the current state of the art with regard to the timecourse of sentence processing in the brain. It outlines the challenges associated with studying timecourse information at the sentence level from a neurobiological perspective and describes competing theoretical and empirical perspectives in this domain. In addition to drawing on findings from neurophysiological methods (electroencephalography [EEG]; magnetoencephalography [MEG]), insights from eye movement measures during natural reading are also taken into account. The chapter concludes that while we are currently unable to make absolute claims about the timecourse of sentence processing from a neurobiological pers…
Prominence Facilitates Ambiguity Resolution: On the Interaction Between Referentiality, Thematic Roles and Word Order in Syntactic Reanalysis
In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigated the relationship between the subject preference in the resolution of subject-object ambiguities in German embedded clauses and semantic word order constraints (i.e., prominence hierarchies relating to the specificity/referentiality of noun phrases, case assignment and thematic role assignment). Our central research question concerned the timecourse with which prominence information is used and particularly whether it modulates the subject preference. In both experiments, we replicated previous findings of reanalysis effects for object-initial structures. Our findings further suggest that noun phrase prominence does not alter initial parsing s…