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Title Information structure in Makhuwa: electrophysiological evidence for a universal processing account
Full text https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2315438121
Date 2024
Author(s) Verdonschot R.G.; Wal, G.J. van der; Ashley, L.; Knudsen, B.; Grebmer zu Wolfsthurn, S. von; Schiller, N.O.; Hagoort, P.
Abstract There is evidence from both behavior and brain activity that the way information is structured, through the use of focus, can up-regulate processing of focused constituents, likely to give prominence to the relevant aspects of the input. This is hypothesized to be universal, regardless of the different ways in which languages encode focus. In order to test this universalist hypothesis, we need to go beyond the more familiar linguistic strategies for marking focus, such as by means of intonation or specific syntactic structures (e.g., it-clefts). Therefore, in this study, we examine Makhuwa-Enahara, a Bantu language spoken in northern Mozambique, which uniquely marks focus through verbal conjugation. The participants were presented with sentences that consisted of either a semantically anomalous constituent or a semantically nonanomalous constituent. Moreover, focus on this particular constituent could be either present or absent. We observed a consistent pattern: Focused information generated a more negative N400 response than the same information in nonfocus position. This demonstrates that regardless of how focus is marked, its consequence seems to result in an upregulation of processing of information that is in focus. Gravitation Grant 024.001.006 of the Language in Interaction Consortium from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) - NWO - 276-78-001 - Theoretical and Experimental Linguistics
Subject(s) Makhuwa; EEG; Focus; Processing
Language en
Type of publication Article / Letter to editor; info:eu-repo/semantics/article; Text
Source Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Identifier doi:10.1073/pnas.2315438121; lucris-id:1307152288
Repository Leiden - University of Leiden
Added to C-A: 2024-09-09;09:29:23