Processing of tense and aspect mismatches in Polish

What is it about?

This two-part paper is concerned with the processing of two types of compound future in Polish, with infinitival and participial complements. In the first part we present a design and predictions of an ERP study whose goal was to monitor the EEG correlates of two types of temporal mismatches: i) tense mismatches between the future auxiliary and the past tense modifier wczoraj (‘yesterday’) relative to the jutro (‘tomorrow’) baseline and ii) aspect mismatches between the future auxiliary and the perfective aspect of the lexical complement relative to the imperfective baseline. In addition, we wanted to assess whether matching tense specifications in different words of a sentence can cause grammatical illusions. To this aim, we tested whether the presence of the adverb wczoraj (‘yesterday’) (specified for [past]) could give rise to an illusion of grammaticality for perfectives as l-participles (allegedly [past] marked), but not as infinitives (not having any [past] specification). The study and its results as well as a general discussion of the findings are presented in Part II of the paper.

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Why is it important?

The discussion in the literature so far has shown that the parser can accurately apply many grammatical constraints but in some cases it reveals a suprising fallibility. NEGATION (NPI licensing), CASE, NUMBER, GENDER are suspectible to grammatical illusions. The behavioral manifestations of grammatical illusions are increased acceptability rates for incorrect sentences under time pressure (higher error rates and prolonged response times for correct judgements). Electrophysiologically, grammatical illusions, which could be understood as “sucessful interference”, can manifest in a reduced (or absent) P600. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no work showing that matching TENSE specifications in different words of a sentence can cause grammatical illusions, similar to what has been described for other grammatical illusion phenomena. In order to approach this question, we conducted an ERP study on the processing of compound future constructions in Polish. These constructions are particularly suitable for our research purpose for the reasons explained in Part II of the paper.

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