Electrophysiological evidence for use of the animacy hierarchy, but not thematic role assignment, during verb-argument processing

Abstract

Animacy is known to play an important role in language processing and production, but debate remains as to how it exerts its effects: (1) through links to syntactic ordering, (2) through inherent differences between animate and inanimate entities in their salience/lexico-semantic accessibility, and (3) through links to specific thematic roles. We contrasted these three accounts in two event-related potential (ERP) experiments examining the processing of direct object arguments in simple English sentences. In Experiment 1, we found a larger N400 to animate than inanimate direct object arguments assigned the Patient role, ruling out the second account. In Experiment 2, we found no difference in the N400 evoked by animate direct object arguments assigned the Patient role (prototypically inanimate) and those assigned the Experiencer role (prototypically animate), ruling out the third account. We therefore suggest that animacy may impact processing through a direct link to syntactic linear ordering, at least on postverbal arguments in English. We also examined processing on direct object arguments that violated the animacy-based selection-restriction constraints of their preceding verbs. These violations evoked a robust P600, which was not modulated by thematic role assignment or reversibility, suggesting that the so-called semantic P600 is driven by overall propositional impossibility, rather than thematic role reanalysis.