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Can Tense Be Subject to Grammatical Illusion? Part 2: Evidence from an ERP Study on the Processing of Tense and Aspect Mismatches in Compound Future Constructions in Polish

Publication date: 19.03.2020

Studies in Polish Linguistics, Volume 15 (2020), Vol. 15, Issue 1, pp. 7 - 36

https://doi.org/10.4467/23005920SPL.20.001.11958

Authors

,
Joanna Błaszczak
University of Wrocław
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8332-2827 Orcid
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Juliane Domke
Max Planck Society, Social Neuroscience Lab, Humboldt University of Berlin, Philippstrasse 13 10099 Berlin, Germany
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Titles

Can Tense Be Subject to Grammatical Illusion? Part 2: Evidence from an ERP Study on the Processing of Tense and Aspect Mismatches in Compound Future Constructions in Polish

Abstract

In this part of the paper we report the results of an ERP study on the processing of two types of compound future in Polish, with infinitival and participial complements. In the study we monitored the EEG correlates of two types of temporal mismatches. Tense mismatches between the future auxiliary and the past tense modifier wczoraj (‘yesterday’) relative to the jutro (‘tomorrow’) baseline resulted in a biphasic (LAN + P600) signature. Aspect mismatches between the future auxiliary and the perfective aspect of the lexical complement (relative to the imperfective baseline) triggered a widely distributed positivity with a posterior maximum (P600). In addition, we wanted to assess whether matching tense specifi cations in different words of a sentence can cause grammatical illusions. To this aim, we tested whether the presence of the adverb wczoraj (‘yesterday’) (specified for [past]) could give rise to an illusion of grammaticality for perfectives as l-participles (allegedly [past] marked), but not as infinitives (not having any [past] specification). Neither behavioral nor electrophysiological results of the present study provided support for this hypothesis. Rather, the findings seem to suggest that TENSE might not belong to the features that are relevant for grammatical illusions, unlike NEGATION, COMPARATIVE, CASE, NUMBER, GENDER, which have been shown to be suspectible to grammatical illusions. We conclude with a discussion of possible underlying reasons for this negative result.

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Information

Information: Studies in Polish Linguistics, Volume 15 (2020), Vol. 15, Issue 1, pp. 7 - 36

Article type: Original article

Titles:

English:

Can Tense Be Subject to Grammatical Illusion? Part 2: Evidence from an ERP Study on the Processing of Tense and Aspect Mismatches in Compound Future Constructions in Polish

Authors

Max Planck Society, Social Neuroscience Lab, Humboldt University of Berlin, Philippstrasse 13 10099 Berlin, Germany

Published at: 19.03.2020

Article status: Open

Licence: CC BY-NC-ND  licence icon

Percentage share of authors:

Joanna Błaszczak (Author) - 50%
Juliane Domke (Author) - 50%

Article corrections:

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Publication languages:

English