Processing of tense and aspect mismatches in Polish

What is it about?

In this paper we report the results of an ERP study on the processing of two types of compound future in Polish, with infinitival and participial complements. In the study we monitored the EEG correlates of two types of temporal mismatches. Tense mismatches between the future auxiliary and the past tense modifier wczoraj (‘yesterday’) relative to the jutro (‘tomorrow’) baseline resulted in a biphasic (LAN + P600) signature. Aspect mismatches between the future auxiliary and the perfective aspect of the lexical complement (relative to the imperfective baseline) triggered a widely distributed positivity with a posterior maximum (P600). In addition, we wanted to assess whether matching tense specifi cations 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). Neither behavioral nor electrophysiological results of the present study provided support for this hypothesis. Rather, the findings seem to suggest that TENSE might not belong to the features that are relevant for grammatical illusions, unlike NEGATION, COMPARATIVE, CASE, NUMBER, GENDER, which have been shown to be suspectible to grammatical illusions. We conclude with a discussion of possible underlying reasons for this negative result.

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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.

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