engleski

Object-Clitic Agreement in Croatian: An ERP Study

Agreement relations in morphologically rich languages participate in establishing the co- referential relationship between pronouns and their antecedents via the patterns of morphological marking. In the Croatian language pronouns are marked for person, number, gender and case. While the antecedent of the pronoun determines its phi-features, in many contexts it is the verb that determines the case of the pronoun. The present experiment was designed as a pilot- experiment for a study on the processing of anaphoric clitics in the Croatian language. The aim of the experiment was to examine the role of long-distance anaphoric relationships and the role of local structural case-constraints during the pronoun interpretation. On-line processing of the cliticised direct-object pronouns embedded in sentence context was examined using the technique of event-related potentials. The pronominal clitics were either morphologically correct or incorrect. The incorrect pronoun forms contained a gender or a case violation, or a double violation of both gender and case. Electrophysiological response to each of the violation types was measured and compared to the one in the control condition. Even though at this stage of the research the results do not give a clear picture of the processes involved in pronoun interpretation and integration, they indicate that, as attested in previous studies in other languages, there are functional and temporal differences between the processing of gender and case violations in pronouns. Whereas the ERP response to gender-violation condition seems to reflect the attempts at the final semantic integration, the case violation condition elicits an ERP component related to the processing of syntactic difficulties. As expected, the results from the double violation condition are the most difficult to interpret. Further research needs to be done in order to determine the relative importance of long- distance and local processes during the pronoun resolution in the Croatian language.

clitics ; agreement ; ERP

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