Abstract
Separable affix verbs consist of a stem and a derivational affix, which, in some languages can appear together or in discontinuous, distributed form, e.g., German “aufgreifen” and “greifen … auf” [“up-pick(ing)” and “pick … up”]. Certain stems can combine with only certain affixes. However, many such combinations are evaluated not as clearly correct or incorrect, but frequently take an intermediate status with participants rating them ambiguously. Here, we mapped brain responses to combinations of verb stems and affixes realized in short sentences, including more and less common particle verbs, borderline acceptable combinations and clear violations. Event-related potential responses to discontinuous particle verbs were obtained for five affixes re-combined with 10 verb stems, situated within short, German sentences, i.e., “sie <stem>en es <affix>,” English: “they <stem> it <affix>.” The congruity of combinations was assessed both with behavioral ratings of the stimuli and corpus-derived probability measures. The size of a frontal N400 correlated with the degree of incongruency between stem and affix, as assessed by both measures. Behavioral ratings performed better than corpus-derived measures in predicting N400 magnitudes, and a combined model performed best of all. No evidence for a discrete, right/wrong effect was found. We discuss methodological implications and integrate the results into past research on the N400 and neurophysiological studies on separable-affix verbs, generally.
Highlights
When participants hear a sentence while under neurophysiological investigation, they often produce a negative deflection in the event-related potential (ERP) waveform peaking approximately 400 ms after the onset of each word in the sentence, known as the N400 (Kutas and Federmeier, 2011)
The negative deflections form a triphasic response, which we interpret as an N1-N2-N400 complex
Confidence intervals (95%) for the alternate model show that the estimated slope parameter for INCONGRUENCY lies between −0.01 and −0.017 uv, i.e., amplitudes in the N400 time-window become more negative as incongruency between stem and affix increases
Summary
When participants hear a sentence while under neurophysiological investigation, they often produce a negative deflection in the event-related potential (ERP) waveform peaking approximately 400 ms after the onset of each word in the sentence, known as the N400 (Kutas and Federmeier, 2011). The amplitude of the N400 has been found to increase reliably with the degree to which the word does not fit the semantic expectations generated by previous words in the sentence (Petten, 1993, for review). Until recently, these investigations have been operationalized mostly using categorical designs: brain responses to stimuli are grouped and averaged into categories such as, e.g., highly anomalous, less anomalous, not anomalous, etc., and differences between these averages are analyzed using standard statistical tests for comparing means, such as ANOVAs or t-tests. Focussing on the N400 in particular, correlational studies have found reliable, continuous relationships between N400 amplitude and orthographic neighborhood, lexical association (Laszlo and Federmeier, 2011) as well as semantic properties (Van Petten, 2014)
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