Electrophysiological correlates of the action vs. role relations congruences in visually situated auditory sentence processing in Korean

Abstract

This study investigated brain responses to verbal action mismatches (e.g. The brother catches/*bites the sister) and role relation mismatches (e.g. The sister catches the brother) in a picture-sentence verification task in Korean using event-related potentials (ERPs). EEG data collected from 30 native Korean speakers revealed a large N400 at the verb for the action mismatch, but an early negativity at the mismatched case-marker of the first NP as well as sustained negativity at the verb for the role mismatch. These results conform to the English-based data (i.e. Knoeferle et al., 2014. Different mechanisms for role relations versus verb-action congruence effects: Evidence from ERPs in picture-sentence verification. Acta Psychologica, 152, 133-148. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2014.08.004) in that the meaning of verb action and the thematic role relations involve different mechanisms in language comprehension. However, cross-lingustic differences were also found in terms of comprehenders' relative sensitivity to different linguistic features in individual languages (e.g. word order in English and case-marking in Korean). Implications of the findings are discussed regrading predictive processing in language comprehension.