Behavioral and neural evidence on the processing of ambiguous adjective-noun dependencies in Korean sentence comprehension

Abstract

In Korean, it is allowed for an adjective to modify a distant noun that appears after an intervening relative clause instead of an adjacent noun. The current study investigated the time course of syntactic and semantic integration between an adjective (A) and an adjacent noun (N1) and/or a distant noun (N2) during on-line reading comprehension of Korean sentences. Semantic congruence between adjectives and nouns were manipulated, such that A was congruent with both N1 and N2, either with N1 or N2, or with none of N1/N2 The reading times and ERPs to critical words revealed that under A-N1 semantic incongruence, not the processing load of N1, but those of the relative clause verb and N2 which is semantically incongruent with A increased. These results imply that the semantic incongruence suppressed the A-N1 integration until the relative clause verb occurred, and the processor immediately attempted the A-N2 integration for a way out from the ultimate processing breakdown even before the occurrence of the main verb.