Verb argument structure processing: The role of verb-specific and argument-specific information

The processing of semantic and structural information concerning the relation between a verb and its arguments is investigated in German in two experiments: In Experiment 1 the verb precedes all its arguments, whereas in Experiment 2 all arguments precede the verb. In both experiments, participants read sentences containing a semantic violation concerning the thematic role, a violation of the number of arguments, or a violation of the grammatical type of the argument (direct versus indirect object) indicated by case marking. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded during sentence reading. ERPs displayed different patterns for each of the violation types in the two experiments. The specific ERP patterns found for the different violation types indicate that the processes concerning the thematic role violation are primarily semantic in nature and that those concerning the grammatical type of argument are purely syntactic. Interestingly, processes concerning the number of arguments seem to trigger semantic processes followed by syntactic processes. The combined findings from the two experiments suggest that the parser uses verb-specific information to build up syntactic and thematic structures against which incoming arguments are checked and that argument-specific information can be used to build up syntactic and thematic structures against which the incoming verb has to be checked to allow lexical integration. (C) 2000 Academic Press.