Effects of (in)transitivity on structure building and agreement

Abstract

The present investigation demonstrates that incremental sentence processing is guided by principles of minimal structure building. Event-related potentials (ERPs) to a local number mismatch between an auxiliary and a subsequent noun phrase revealed that the subject preference, a strategy known to be very robust during processing, can be overridden when information about a verb's valency (i.e., the number and type of arguments a verb requires) is available. Using verb-initial sentences, the ERP data revealed a left anterior negativity for the local number mismatch at the noun phrase following the finite verb compared to a locally matching condition in conditions with intransitive verbs, but no effect following conditions with transitive verbs. This indicates that grammar-internal information guides minimal structure formation, such that verbs that require only one argument reveal an immediate mismatch effect, while verbs that require two arguments neglect the subject preference and opt for an alternative interpretation in light of the number mismatch. The study reveals that the decisions made at this point have consequences for the processing of subsequent elements within the sentence. Using coordination constructions (e.g., the dancer and the singer), the study reports additional ERP results at the coordinating conjunction and at the second noun phrase of the coordination, which provide further evidence that verb valency is taken into consideration during incremental parsing and can override local agreement expectations.