Electrophysiological Correlates of Complement Coercion

■ This study examined the electrophysiological correlates of complement coercion. ERPs were measured as participants read and made acceptability judgments about plausible coerced sentences, plausible noncoerced sentences, and highly implausible animacy-violated sentences (“The journalist began/wrote/ astonished the article before his coffee break”). Relative to noncoerced complement nouns, the coerced nouns evoked an N400 effect. This effect was not modulated by the number of possible activities implied by the coerced nouns (e.g., began reading the article; began writing the article) and did not differ in either magnitude or scalp distribution from the N400 effect evoked by the animacy-violated complement nouns. We suggest that the N400 modulation to both coerced and animacy-violated complement nouns reflected different types of mismatches between the semantic restrictions of the verb and the semantic properties of the incoming complement noun. This is consistent with models hol...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: JOCN
• Authors: Gina R. Kuperberg, Arim Choi, Neil Cohn, Martin Paczynski, Ray Jackendoff
• Keywords: Coerced, Complement Noun, JOCN 2010, Plausible Coerced Sentences