Bhattamishra, S. | bioRxiv Science

bioRxiv2025

Processing Ergativity in Compound Light Verb Constructions: Electrophysiological Evidence from Hindi

Ergativity marks subject arguments as agents of a transitive event and thereby signals verbal transitivity and influences language comprehension. We report here on an event-related brain potentials (ERP) study in Hindi, in which we investigated this interconnection to ascertain whether the ergative case as a processing cue and its ERP correlates can be generalized across and within ergative languages. The case marking on the subject argument (ergative or nominative case) in our study either matched or mismatched with the transitivity of the light verb (transitive or intransitive) in compound light verb constructions. Ergative case violations due to an intransitive light verb evoked an N400 effect, whereas nominative case violations due to a transitive light verb elicited a P600 effect. The results reveal neurophysiological differences in the processing of ergative and nominative case alignment modulated by the transitivity of the light verbs. The findings highlight the need for cross-linguistic research to aim beyond universality and elucidate the mechanism underlying the processing of language-specific structural variations.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2019

Animacy modulates gender agreement computation in Hindi: An ERP study

Gender has been investigated in psycholinguistics research both with respect to how it is retrieved when a noun is encountered and the computation of its agreement dependencies between different elements in a sentence. The literature is abound with differences as to the processing of gender agreement computations across languages and constructs. Similarly, neurophysiological evidence with respect to gender retrieval mechanisms differ wherein languages differ in the way the gender feature is retrieved when a noun is encountered based on different properties. The present study aims to scrutinize gender agreement computations in verb-agreement relations in Hindi and to ascertain if the intrinsic property (i.e. the animacy) of a noun participating in the relation plays a role in processing agreement dependencies. In addition, it also looks into the issue of whether the gender retrieval mechanism in the language influences agreement comprehension. Results revealed a positivity for the animate subject agreement and a negativity for the inanimate subject agreement violations at the position of the verb respectively. The results are suggestive of distinct processing mechanisms underlying semantic and syntactic gender. Further, the results also suggest that gender agreement computation in Hindi is modulated by the way gender is retrieved at the position of the noun.

animal behavior and cognition↗