Psychology Department, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853–7601, USA.
Int J Psychophysiol. 2011 Dec;82(3):207-16. doi: 10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2011.06.010. Epub 2011 Jul 6.
Non-adjacent dependencies are thought to be more costly to process than sentences wherein dependents immediately follow or precede what they depend on. In English locality effects have been revealed, while in languages with rich case marking (German and Hindi) sentence final structures show anti-locality-effects. The motivation of the current study is to test whether locality effects can be directly applied to a typologically different language than those investigated so far. Hungarian is a "topic prominent" language; it permits a variation of possible word sequencing for semantic reasons, including SVO word order. Hungarian also has a rich morphological system (e.g., rich case system) and postpositions to indicate grammatical functions. In the present ERP study, Hungarian subject-verb dependencies were compared by manipulating the mismatch of number agreement between the sentence's initial noun phrase and the sentence's final intransitive verb as well as the complexity of the intervening sentence material, interrupting the dependencies. Possible lexical class and frequency or cloze-probability effects for the first two words of the intervening sentence material were revealed when used separate baseline for each word, while at the third word of the intervening material as well as at the main verb ERPs were not modulated by complexity but at the verb ERPs were enhanced by grammaticality. Ungrammatical sentences enlarged the amplitude of both LAN and P600 components at the main verb. These results are in line with studies suggesting that the retrieval of the first element of a dependency is not influenced by distance from the second element, as the first element is directly accessible when needed for integration (e.g., McElree, 2000).
非相邻依存关系被认为比依赖项直接跟随或先于其依赖项的句子处理起来更为昂贵。在英语中已经揭示了局部性效应，而在具有丰富格标记的语言（德语和印地语）中，句子结尾结构则表现出反局部性效应。本研究的动机是测试局部性效应是否可以直接应用于与迄今为止研究的语言不同的类型学语言。匈牙利语是一种“主题突出”的语言；它允许根据语义原因改变可能的单词排序，包括 SVO 词序。匈牙利语还有丰富的形态系统（例如，丰富的格系统）和后置词来表示语法功能。在目前的 ERP 研究中，通过操纵句子初始名词短语和句子最终非及物动词之间的数一致不匹配以及句子中间材料的复杂性来比较匈牙利语的主语-动词依存关系，从而打断依存关系。当为每个单词分别使用单独的基线时，当句子中间材料的前两个单词以及主要动词 ERP 时，可能会揭示词汇类和频率或 cloze 概率效应，而当句子中间材料的第三个单词以及主要动词 ERP 时，则不会因复杂性而被调制，但在动词 ERP 时会因语法性而增强。不合法的句子会在主要动词处增大 LAN 和 P600 分量的幅度。这些结果与表明依赖项的第一个元素的检索不受与第二个元素的距离影响的研究结果一致，因为当需要进行集成时，第一个元素可以直接访问（例如，McElree，2000）。
