nominal and verbal categories; verbal nouns; converbs; derived forms; ERP; P200

What is it about?

Traditionally, languages are assumed to minimally manifest a distinction between nouns and verbs. This assumption has occasionally been debated in the theoretical linguistic literature, in particular in the context of challenging verbal noun constructions that simultaneously manifest nominal and verbal features. From a psycholinguistic perspective, one of the most promising diagnostic criteria for determining whether a given word belongs to the category NOUN or VERB is an event-related brain potential (ERP) component, P200, whose amplitude is larger for verbs than for nouns. So far, a challenge for the interpretation of the P200 has been whether this component reflects verbal (e.g., action) semantics, lexical category or verb-related morphological operation. In the present study we report an ERP experiment whose goal was to contribute to a better understanding of the nature of the “verbal” P200 component by monitoring the comprehension of Polish morphologically related finite verbs, converbs, and verbal nouns. Thereby, we manipulated the syntactic category and morphological complexity of the critical words while keeping their semantics identical. Results show that finite verbs engender a smaller amplitude of the P200 component than less prototypical “verbs” such as verbal nouns and converbs. Based on this observation, we argue that the P200 component reflects the brain activation triggered by the demands of verb-related morphological integration processes performed on the verbal base of derived forms.

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Why is it important?

It is a traditional assumption that languages minimally manifest a distinction between nouns and verbs (see, for instance, Sapir 1921; Croft 1991; 2003; 2005; Baker 2003; 2015; Borer 2005; Evans & Osada 2005). This assumption has occasionally been debated on the basis of the observation that some languages (e.g., Samoan, Mosel & Hovdhaugen 1992; Riau Indonesian, Gil 2005; 2013; Kharia, Peterson 2006; Nuu-chah-nulth, Braithwaite 2015) do not seem to distinguish between nouns and verbs in a straightforward manner (see Zeijlstra 2016). It appears that no real consensus can be reached as to the universal nature of the noun-verb distinction (see, e.g., Evans 2000 and Bisang 2010; see also Haspelmath 2015) until a good theory-neutral set of criteria can be found for identifying the lexical categories NOUN and VERB. How to clearly define nouns and verbs has been debated by both theoretical linguists and psycholinguists with different degrees of success. In psycholinguistics, or more precisely in the studies using electrophysiological measures of brain reactions to linguistic stimuli, one of the most promising category-related diagnostics is the so-called “verbal signature” P200. This is an event-related brain potential manifested as a short positive deflection, peaking around 200 ms, thus enhancing the P2 component relative to a baseline. It is thought to signal the processing of verbs as opposed to nouns, both in single word recognition (Preissl et al. 1995; Pulvermüller et al. 1999; Kellenbach et al. 2002) and in a sentence context (Federmeier et al. 2000). However, the nature of the P200 signature is still controversial. The goal of this paper is to provide a significant advance in the understanding of this theory-neutral “verbal” diagnostic. By doing this we also hope to contribute to the discussion related to the organization of the knowledge of the categories NOUN and VERB in the mind. In order to achieve this goal, we conducted an ERP (event-related brain potentials) study in which we monitored the processing of Polish past tense finite verbs, converbs and verbal nouns. Using these three different word types allowed us to tease apart the contributions of noun- and verb-like properties to the processing of the categories NOUN and VERB.