Rausch, P. . 1, 2, 3 , Krifka, M. 2, 4 & Sommer, W. 3
1 Berlin School of Mind and Brain. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Berlin, Germany.
2 Department of German Language and Linguistics. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Berlin, Germany.
3 Department of Psychology. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Berlin, Germany.
4 Centre for General Linguistics. Berlin, Germany.
From a sentence like 'The doctor cured Mary', we can infer that Mary necessarily underwent a change of state in the course of the event expressed by the verb 'cured', while the same is not true in a sentence like 'The doctor treated Mary'. Verbs thus imply different degrees of 'affectedness' for their object arguments and this factor is one of the semantic key determinants for verb-argument linking at the semantics/syntax interface. To assess the impact of affectedness for this linking process during online sentence processing, we conducted a self-paced-reading experiment and an ERP study. To minimize the influence of sentence internal syntactic cues, we used German deverbal event nominalizations of verbs implying different affectedness levels (e.g. 'admiration-treatment-assassination') embedded in sentence contexts and followed by genitives that either referred to agents or patients of an event introduced in a context sentence. ERP data were analyzed using a wavelet-based functional mixed model. First ERP analyses converge with reading time and acceptability patterns and suggest a prominent role of a frontal P600-like component, while no effect on the N400 is found. We discuss the findings in light of recent processing studies on compositional semantics and the roles of the N400/P600 component families.