Processing of temporary syntactic ambiguity in Italian "who"-questions: a study with event-related potentials.
This study investigated the processing of direct Italian "who"-questions, containing a temporary ambiguity of the syntactic role (subject/object) of the initial pronoun. To this aim we measured event-related potentials (ERPs) evoked by the disambiguating verbal agreement word and by the following ones. Results showed two positive deflections, corresponding to a P300 and to a P600, only at the target verb of the object-first extraction, the condition which has been demonstrated to be less preferred by speakers. The functional meaning of this positive complex, similar to patterns already reported for German subject/object ambiguous relative clauses, was discussed with reference both to results obtained in other languages using similar sentences and to psycholinguistic parsing models.
Penolazzi
Barbara
B
Department of General Psychology, University of Padova, Via Venezia 8, 35131 Padova, Italy. barbara.penolazzi@unipd.it
De Vincenzi
Marica
M
Angrilli
Alessandro
A
Job
Remo
R
D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D019303:Multilingualism; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics; D013997:Time Factors