Online Processing of Temporal Agreement in a Grammatical Tone Language: An ERP Study.

Frank Tsiwah,Jacolien Van Rij,Srđan Popov,Roelien Bastiaanse

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.638716

Abstract

Previous electrophysiological studies that have examined temporal agreement violations in (Indo-European) languages that use grammatical affixes to mark time reference, have found a Left Anterior Negativity (LAN) and/or P600 ERP components, reflecting morpho-syntactic and syntactic processing, respectively. The current study investigates the electrophysiological processing of temporal relations in an African language (Akan) that uses grammatical tone, rather than morphological inflection, for time reference. Twenty-four native speakers of Akan listened to sentences with time reference violations. Our results demonstrate that a violation of a present context by a past verb yields a P600 time-locked to the verb. There was no such effect when a past context was violated by a present verb. In conclusion, while there are similarities in both Akan and Indo-European languages, as far as the modulation of the P600 effect is concerned, the nature of this effect seems to be different for these languages.

Highlights

The notion of time is encoded differently across languages in the world
The current study investigated the effect of grammatical tone on the processing of temporalagreement in Akan, using event-related potentials (ERP) brain imaging technique
First to examine the electrophysiological processes involved in temporalagreement in a grammatical tone language, and how they relate to the morphosyntactic processing of tense reported for Indo-European languages

Summary

Introduction

The notion of time is encoded differently across languages in the world. In many Indo-European languages such as English and Dutch, tense inflection on the verb is used to indicate whether the event happened in the past or is currently happening, whereas some Asian languages such as Chinese, Thai and Standard Indonesian use aspectual adverbs for this purpose. Most of the data on tense (dis)agreement studies come from Indo-European languages, and make the study of time reference strongly biased toward certain devices (such as tense morphology) and certain languages (Klein, 2009). It remains unclear whether findings from tense and/or time reference studies are specific to languages that use inflectional verb morphology (such as tense in Indo-European languages) or can be extended to languages that use other means of encoding time reference. The focus of the current study is on the electrophysiological processing of time reference expressed through grammatical tone, rather than morphological inflection, using event-related potentials (ERP) brain imaging technique. The main question is whether the neural mechanism(s) related to time reference encoding in other languages are specific to those languages, or can be extended to Akan, which is a tonal language that uses tone, for temporal reference

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