Prospective NPI licensing and intrusion in Turkish
ERPs were employed to examine the processing of NPI/licensor dependencies in Turkish. Previous work on languages like English/German have documented intrusion effects, where structurally ineligible licensors interfere with violation responses to unlicensed NPIs (a species of “grammatical illusion”). Turkish makes it possible to test intrusion effects in environments where NPIs precede their licensors and thus where intrusive licensors can intervene between NPIs and legitimate licensors. We show that: (i) intrusion effects do arise in Turkish, (ii) that brain responses at positions where intrusive licensors are encountered strongly resemble patterns observed for conditions where licensing permissible (both situations reveal patterns seen for other types of long-distance dependency processing, e.g. filler-gap relationships in interrogatives), leading to (iii) attenuation of downstream violation responses. Accounts of intrusion in terms of cue-based retrieval versus erroneous pragmatic licensing are discussed in the context of these findings, underscoring the importance of cross-linguistic experimental work
@article{yanilmazdrury2018,
Author = {Yanilmaz, A. and Drury, J. E.},
Doi = {10.1080/23273798.2017.1371779},
Journal = {Language, Cognition and Neuroscience},
Number = {1},
Pages = {111-138},
Title = {Prospective {NPI} licensing and intrusion in {T}urkish},
Url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2017.1371779},
Volume = {33},
Year = {2018}