Complexity and Revision in the Syntactic Analysis of Dependency Relation in Korean: An ERP Study of the Long-distance Anaphor Caki

Abstract

This study investigates whether the violation of the locality condition on reflexive binding comes with processing costs during referential resolution of the Korean anaphor caki. In an event-related potential (ERP) experiment we found that, compared with the long-distance reference condition, ERP responses to the caki-mediated gender-dependent noun were significantly more positive in the local reference condition in the earliest time window (P300). However, the noun elicited a right anterior negativity (RAN) in the later time window, followed by a positivity in the ensuing time window (P600) in the long-distance, relative to the local, reference condition. It is suggested that the initial P300 effects observed in the local reference condition reflect a breach of the lexical requirement of caki that it tend to take a long-distance antecedent. It is also suggested that linking the reflexive with a distant, rather than a local, antecedent during its referential resolution requires more processing resources. The RAN effects may, on the one hand, reflect the detection of incongruence between the mental representation dictated by the general locality condition on reflexives and the representation based on the processing of the noun that matches in gender with the distant matrix subject. The P600 effects may, on the other hand, be associated with a second-pass, revised integration process that binds the reflexive with the matrix subject.