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KMID : 1036820180230030660
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Communication Sciences & Disorders
2018 Volume.23 No. 3 p.660 ~ p.682
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ERP Components Associated with Syntactic Ambiguity and Word Order Canonicity in Processing Sentence with Ditransitive Verb between Young and Elderly Adults
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Yoo Hae-Mi
Sung Jee-Eun
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Abstract
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Objectives: The purpose was to investigate differences between young and elderly adults in event-related potentials (ERPs) associated with syntactic ambiguity and word order canonicity in processing sentences with ditransitive verbs using a verb-final language.
Methods: A total of 48 participants participated in the study. A sentence comprehension task and an online ERP analysis were used. The stimuli were composed of 5 phrases such as a noun phrase 1 (nominative phrase), a noun phrase 2 (dative phrase), an adverbial phrase, a noun phrase 3 (accusative phrase), and a verb. These phrases were divided into two conditions, syntactic ambiguity and word order canonicity. Canonical word order consists of a dative phrase before an accusative phrase and non-canonical word order has the accusative phrase before the dative phrase. Syntactic ambiguity was manipulated through the deletion of object case markers.
Results: Behavioral results revealed that the elderly group showed significantly lower accuracy and slower reaction time than the younger group, especially in ambiguous condition when compared with the unambiguous condition. ERP results revealed that younger adults generated N400 but elderly adults generated P600 for noun phrase 3 in ambiguous sentences. Younger adults generated P300 in canonical sentences and greater negativity in non-canonical sentences for noun phrase 2 in the ambiguous condition. Conversely, elderly adults generated similar sentence processing patterns in both canonical and non-canonical sentences.
Discussion: The results indicated that processing patterns for syntactic ambiguity and word order canonicity in ditransitive sentences are significantly different between two groups. The elderly adults’ ERP processing feature could be an attribute of age-related language changes.
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KEYWORD
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ERP, Sentence with ditransitive verb, Syntactic ambiguity, Word order canonicity, Aging, Sentence processing
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