TY - JOUR A1 - Saddy, Douglas A1 - Drenhaus, Heiner A1 - Frisch, Stefan T1 - Processing polarity items : Contrastive licensing costs N2 - We describe an experiment that investigated the failure to license polarity items in German using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). The results reveal distinct processing reflexes associated with failure to license positive polarity items in comparison to failure to license negative polarity items. Failure to license both negative and positive polarity items elicited an N400 component reflecting semantic integration cost. Failure to license positive polarity items, however, also elicited a P600 component. The additional P600 in the positive polarity violations may reflect higher processing complexity associated with a negative operator. This difference between the two types of violation suggests that the processing of negative and positive polarity items does not involve identical mechanisms. (C) 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved Y1 - 2004 SN - 0093-934X ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Frisch, Stefan A1 - Schlesewsky, Matthias A1 - Wegner, H. T1 - The interaction of morphological case and word order constraints : Cross-linguistic ERP evidence from German, Russian and Finnish Y1 - 2005 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Vogel, Ralf A1 - Frisch, Stefan T1 - The resolution of case conflicts BT - a pilot study JF - Linguistics in Potsdam N2 - This paper reports the results of a pilot study on the resolution of case conflicts in German free relative constructions. Section 1 gives a brief introduction into the phenomenon, section 2 presents the experiment and its results, section 3 ends the paper with a brief more general discussion. Y1 - 2003 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-32466 SN - 1616-7392 SN - 1864-1857 VL - 21 SP - 91 EP - 103 PB - Universitätsverlag Potsdam CY - Potsdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Frisch, Stefan A1 - Schlesewsky, Matthias T1 - The resolution of case conflicts from a neurophysiological perspective N2 - We present two ERP experiments examining the resolution of language processing conflicts involving the multidimensional linguistic feature case, which determines processing in both syntactic and interpretive respects. Ungrammatical German structures with two identically case-marked arguments (double subject or double object constructions) were tested. In earlier studies, double subject constructions have been shown to elicit a biphasic pattern consisting of an N400 effect (a marker of thematic integration problems) followed by a P600 effect (a marker of syntactic ill-formedness). Here, we compare double nominative (subject case) constructions with double datives (indirect object case; Experiment 1) and double accusatives (direct object case; Experiment 2). All types of double case ungrammaticalities elicited a biphasic N400-P600 response. However, double datives differed from double nominatives in that they elicited a larger P600, suggesting that the ill-formedness is more salient in structures with two dative arguments. Double accusatives, by contrast, elicited a stronger N400 in comparison to double nominatives, suggesting that they induce more severe semantic-thematic integration problems. The results demonstrate that the human language comprehension system is sensitive to fine grained linguistic distinctions between different cases and utilizes these in its attempts to solve processing conflicts. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved Y1 - 2005 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Beim Graben, Peter A1 - Frisch, Stefan A1 - Fink, A. A1 - Saddy, Douglas A1 - Kurths, Jürgen T1 - Topographic voltage and coherence mapping of brain potentials by means of the symbolic resonance analysis N2 - We apply the recently developed symbolic resonance analysis to electroencephalographic measurements of event- related brain potentials (ERPs) in a language processing experiment by using a three-symbol static encoding with varying thresholds for analyzing the ERP epochs, followed by a spin-flip transformation as a nonlinear filter. We compute an estimator of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for the symbolic dynamics measuring the coherence of threshold-crossing events. Hence, we utilize the inherent noise of the EEG for sweeping the underlying ERP components beyond the encoding thresholds. Plotting the SNR computed within the time window of a particular ERP component (the N400) against the encoding thresholds, we find different resonance curves for the experimental conditions. The maximal differences of the SNR lead to the estimation of optimal encoding thresholds. We show that topographic brain maps of the optimal threshold voltages and of their associated coherence differences are able to dissociate the underlying physiological processes, while corresponding maps gained from the customary voltage averaging technique are unable to do so Y1 - 2005 SN - 1539-3755 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Frisch, Stefan A1 - Hahne, A. A1 - Friederici, A. D. T1 - Word category and verb-argument structure information in the dynamics of parsing N2 - One of the core issues in psycholinguistic research concerns the relationship between word category information and verb-argument structure (e.g. transitivity) information of verbs in the process of sentence parsing. In two experiments (visual versus auditory presentation) using event-related brain potentials (ERPs), we addressed this question by presenting sentences in which the critical word simultaneously realized both a word category and a transitivity violation. ERPs for sentences with both types of violation clustered with the patterns for sentences with a word category violation only, but were different from the patterns elicited by argument structure violations in isolation, since only the latter elicited an N400 ERP component. The finding that an argument structure violation evoked an N400 only if the phrase structure of the respective sentence was correct suggests that a successful integration of the word category information of a verb functionally precedes the application of its argument structure information. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved Y1 - 2004 SN - 0010-0277 ER -