Repair, Revision, and Complexity in the Syntactic Analysis of Dependency Relations for the three Korean Anaphors: An ERP-based Neurophysiological Differentiation

Abstract

In an attempt to better understand how linguistic dependencies areconstructed in online sentence processing, we examined the processing ofthe three Korean anaphors caki, caki-casin, and casin using event-relatedpotentials (ERPs). In our study we used gender-denoting kinship nounsto dictate either short- (SD) or long-distance (LD) binding of theanaphors at issue. The results showed that in the LD relative to SDcondition, the critical gender-denoting noun after caki elicited a positivityat the fronto-centro-parietal region in the 600-650 ms interval (i.e., a P600effect), that after caki-casin also evoked a positivity at the centro-parietalregion in the 550-650 ms interval, but those after casin revealed anegativity at the anterior region in the 600-650 ms interval (i.e., an LANeffect). We interpret these responses as indicating that in the LD relativeto SD condition, the late (550-650 ms) ERP responses associated with cakireflect complexity-related syntactic revision, those with caki-casin reflectsyntactic repair, and those with casin reflect morphologicalviolation/working memory difficulty. These patterns of results alsoimplicate a role for structured search during online sentencecomprehension, whereby certain structural positions are accessed withoutregard to their binding-related semantic content during the constructionof antecedent-anaphor dependencies for the three Korean anaphorsinvestigated in this paper.