Abstract
Subject relative (SR) clauses have a reliable processing advantage in VO languages like English in which relative clauses (RCs) follow the head noun. The question is whether this is also routinely true of OV languages like Japanese and Korean, in which RCs precede the head noun. We conducted an event-related brain potential (ERP) study of Korean RCs to test whether the SR advantage manifests in brain responses as well, and to tease apart the typological factors that might contribute to them. Our results suggest that brain responses to RCs are remarkably similar in VO and OV languages, but that ordering of the RC and its head noun localizes the response to different sentence positions. Our results also suggest that marking the right edge of the RC in Chinese (Yang et al. 2010) and Korean and the absence of it in Japanese (Ueno & Garnsey 2008) affect the response to the following head noun. The consistent SR advantage found in ERP studies lends further support to a universal subject preference in the processing of relative clauses.
Highlights
At least since the pioneering work of Sir William Jones on Sanskrit at the end of the eighteenth century, linguistic analysis has aimed at differentiating those aspects of the human language faculty that are universal in nature, that is, shared by all known languages, from those that are specific to individual languages
It is important to bear in mind that comprehension questions are a measure of off-line language processing, while event-related brain potential (ERP) are a measure of ongoing brain activity
This article investigated the brain responses elicited by relative clause constructions in Korean, namely sustained anterior negativity in response to the relative clause region and transient anterior negativity to the head noun position
Summary
At least since the pioneering work of Sir William Jones on Sanskrit at the end of the eighteenth century (in which he showed by means of comparisons with Latin and Greek that these languages were related), linguistic analysis has aimed at differentiating those aspects of the human language faculty that are universal in nature, that is, shared by all known languages, from those that are specific to individual (groups of) languages. There has always been an inherent tension between emphasizing language-universal vs language-specific properties in linguistic theorizing In recent years, it has become apparent from the results especially of neurophysiological studies that language-universal vs language-specific aspects of language processing in the brain need to be differentiated in like manner, with a view to determining whether either predominates in a given language. It has become apparent from the results especially of neurophysiological studies that language-universal vs language-specific aspects of language processing in the brain need to be differentiated in like manner, with a view to determining whether either predominates in a given language Even though it deals with the processing of relative clauses in Korean, the current study can be viewed as a contribution to this larger area of inquiry. We frame our discussion in these terms to highlight the fact that universal and specific properties of language can be identified and compared in terms of language structure, and in terms of language processing
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