Information structure in Makhuwa: Electrophysiological evidence for a universal processing account
Publication year
2024Author(s)
Number of pages
6 p.
Source
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 121, 30, (2024), article e2315438121ISSN
Publication type
Article / Letter to editor
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Organization
PI Group Neurobiology of Language
SW OZ DCC PL
Journal title
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA
Volume
vol. 121
Issue
iss. 30
Languages used
English (eng)
Subject
110 000 Neurocognition of Language; PsycholinguisticsAbstract
In the quest to understand our human language capacity, linguists and neuroscientists aim to find universal patterns. In this study, we recorded electrical brain activity in speakers of Makhuwa-Enahara, a Bantu language spoken in northern Mozambique. We investigated how the marking of focus influences language processing in this language. In contrast to most Indo-European languages Makhuwa-Enahara uniquely marks focus (highlighting the relevant part of the utterance) in the verbal morphology, instead of prosodically. Our findings point toward a universal pattern where focus marking results in an upregulation of focused information, irrespective of how it is linguistically marked. The universality of focus marking is hence not in its linguistic form, but in the processing consequences it has. There is evidence from both behavior and brain activity that the way information is structured, through the use of focus, can up-regulate processing of focused constituents, likely to give prominence to the relevant aspects of the input. This is hypothesized to be universal, regardless of the different ways in which languages encode focus. In order to test this universalist hypothesis, we need to go beyond the more familiar linguistic strategies for marking focus, such as by means of intonation or specific syntactic structures (e.g., it-clefts). Therefore, in this study, we examine Makhuwa-Enahara, a Bantu language spoken in northern Mozambique, which uniquely marks focus through verbal conjugation. The participants were presented with sentences that consisted of either a semantically anomalous constituent or a semantically nonanomalous constituent. Moreover, focus on this particular constituent could be either present or absent. We observed a consistent pattern: Focused information generated a more negative N400 response than the same information in nonfocus position. This demonstrates that regardless of how focus is marked, its consequence seems to result in an upregulation of processing of information that is in focus.
This item appears in the following Collection(s)
- Academic publications [245186]
- Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging [4021]
- Electronic publications [132505]
- Faculty of Social Sciences [30339]
- Open Access publications [106110]
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