Každyj den’ turist *otdoxnul na pljaže. An event-related potentials study on the processing of aspectual violation in Russian iterative sentences

Zeller, Jan Patrick; Clasmeier, Christina

Zusammenfassung

The treatment of verbal aspect in Russian grammar and its interaction with lexical semantics are controversial matters. We address these issues from a psycholinguistic perspective. We conducted an EEG study with 14 native Russian speakers processing 160 sentences in the unrestrictedly iterative meaning; the sentences were either correct or contained semantic, morpho-syntactic, or aspectual violations (e.g., Každyj večer otec *zasnulpfv na divane. ‘Every evening the father *fell asleep on the sofa’). Processing the aspectual violation resulted in a P600, which is typical for processing morpho-syntactic violations and usually is interpreted as an index of difficulties in syntactic (re-)analysis, while an N400, which is typical for processing lexico-semantic violations, could not be observed. Our results show that Russian speakers must make more effort to analyze aspectually incorrect sentences com- pared with aspectually correct sentences. Processing aspectual violations in Russian clearly resembles processing of morpho-syntactic violations. This is in line with the interpretation of aspect as a typical grammatical category.