Studies
Object Shift and the Brain
The first study (Roll, Horne, and Lindgren, In press) concerns Swedish ‘Object Shift’ (Holmberg, 1986). In Swedish, a pronominal object may either precede or follow a sentence adverb, as in Hon åt den inte/inte den ‘(lit.) She ate it not/not it’. Full NPs always follow the sentence adverb. Thus, Hon åt inte glass/glassen ‘(lit.) she ate not ice-cream/the ice-cream’ is fine, whereas Hon åt glass/glassen inte ‘(lit) she ate ice-cream/the ice-cream not’ is ill-formed. In the study, an early posterior negativity was found after Object Shift with indefinite full NPs.
Neurophysiological Reality of a Left Boundary Tone in Swedish
Roll (2004, 2006) found an intonational rise at the left boundary of subordinate clauses with main clause word order. In the present study, we will test to see if the brain response to the boundary tone indicates that it by itself suffices to determine the syntactic structure it correlates with.
References
Holmberg, Anders. 1986. Word order and syntactic features in Scandinavian languages and English. Doctoral dissertation. University of Stockholm.
Roll, Mikael. 2004. Prosodic cues to the syntactic structure of subordinate clauses in Swedish. MA thesis. Lund University.
Roll, Mikael 2006. Prosodic cues to the syntactic structure of subordinate clauses in Swedish. In Gösta Bruce and Merle Horne (eds.), Nordic Prosody: Proceedings of the IX:th conference, Lund 2004. Peter Lang, 195-204.
Roll, M., Horne, M., and Lindgren, M. In press. Object shift and event-related brain potentials. Journal of Neurolinguistics.
Roll, M., Horne, M., and Lindgren, M. 2007. Object shift and event-related brain potentials. Poster presented at Cognitive Neuroscience Society 14th Annual Meeting.
Roll, Mikael. 2004. Prosodic cues to the syntactic structure of subordinate clauses in Swedish. MA thesis. Lund University.
Roll, Mikael 2006. Prosodic cues to the syntactic structure of subordinate clauses in Swedish. In Gösta Bruce and Merle Horne (eds.), Nordic Prosody: Proceedings of the IX:th conference, Lund 2004. Peter Lang, 195-204.
Roll, M., Horne, M., and Lindgren, M. In press. Object shift and event-related brain potentials. Journal of Neurolinguistics.
Roll, M., Horne, M., and Lindgren, M. 2007. Object shift and event-related brain potentials. Poster presented at Cognitive Neuroscience Society 14th Annual Meeting.