Standing avocados, or when ratings of sentences and brain processing tells different stories

• Languages differ in how placement events are described. Swedish has three obligatory placement verbs for events where objects have support from below: sätta ’set’, ställa ’stand’, and lägga ’lay’. These verbs are highly frequent yet difficult to acquire for learners of Swedish. The verb choice depends on object properties, and the direction of the object’s extension from the ground. We extend previous findings by introducing event-related potentials (ERPs) and appropriateness ratings of verb usage to investigate the interaction between verb semantics and event properties. Native speakers of Swedish watched still images of placement events followed by visually presented sentences describing these events while ERPs were recorded. Participants also did appropriateness ratings offline. Object properties (Base/Without base), symmetry (Symmetric/Asymmetric), and orientation from the ground (Vertical/Horizontal) were varied and each placement verb was combined with each image across participants. Previous ERP-studies have shown that different types of violations are related to different types of ERP effects. Semantic congruency affect a centro-medial negativity—the N400 (Kutas & Hillyard, 1980) while a centro-parietal positivity—the P600 is affected when real-world knowledge is violated (e.g., using a screwdriver as a key, Balconi & Caldiroli, 2011). Results showed an increased amplitude of both ERP effects when placement verbs were incongruent with the depicted event including objects with a base. For objects without a base the ERP effects were in addition related to incongruency with real world knowledge—e.g., avocados are usually not vertically placed i.e., standing on a table. With the inclusion of the neurophysiological measure sensitivity to event features not captured by ratings was revealed. Combined results corroborate and elucidate existing analyses of the complexity of verb semantics. A better understanding of native speakers’ processing of placement verbs opens new options for probing the difficulties of learning Swedish placement verbs for adult second language learners.

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Jämförande språkvetenskap och allmän lingvistik (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- General Language Studies and Linguistics (hsv//eng)

Keyword

CBL

placementverbs

Swedish

Humaniora

Humanities

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)