Linear Precedence in Morphosyntactic and Semantic Processes in Korean Sentential Processing as Revealed by Event-related Potential

Abstract

The current study was conducted to examine the temporal and spatial activation sequences related to morphosyntactic, semantic and orthographic-lexical sentences, focusing on the morphological-orthographic and lexical-semantic deviation processes in Korean language processing. The Event-related Potentials (ERPs) of 15 healthy students were adopted to explore the processing of headfinal critical words in a sentential plausibility task. Specifically, it was examined whether the ERP-pattern to orthographic-lexical violation might show linear precedence over other processes, or the presence of additivity across combined processing components. For the morphosyntactic violation, fronto-central LAN followed by P600 was found, while semantic violation elicited N400, as expected. Activation of P600 was distributed in the left frontal and central sites, while N400 appeared even in frontal sites other than the centro-parietal areas. Most importantly, the orthographic-lexical violation process revealed by earlier N2 with fronto-central activity was shown to be complexes of morphological and semantic functions from the same critical word. The present study suggests that there is a linear precedence over the morphological deviation and its lexical semantic processing based on the immediate possibility of lexical information, followed by sentential semantics. Finally, late syntactic integration processes were completed, showing different topographic activation in order of importance of ongoing sentential information.