Processing it-cleft sentences in Brazilian Portuguese: an ERP study of leftward-moved constituents in role-reversed sentences

Abstract

In this paper we deepened on the processing of cleft role-reversed structures, based on empirical evidence of standard Brazilian Portuguese (BP). We used the electrophysiological technique (EEG/ERP) to map distinguished syntactic and semantic processes, for instance, the N400 and the P600, addressing the focus structures in It-clefts clauses structured in three different experimental conditions: (i) Congruous Cleft Condition: It was the SURFER that the shark attacked in Hawaii; (ii) Reversed Cleft Condition: It was the SHARK that the surfer attacked in Hawaii; and (iii) Incongruous Cleft Condition: It was the COUCH that the shark attacked in Hawaii. Taken together, our findings suggest that the presence of P600s related to role-reversed sentences in previous studies could be attributed to the syntactic reanalysis, instead of the processing of the role reversed item per se. Also, the presence of an N400 effect to the reversals could be due to the frustration of the strong combination of contextual constraints and strong lexical association. Our results make a unique contribution to the ERP response profiles, specially regarding the relationship between the role-reversals and the animacy violations in the Cleft structural frame. Our ERP findings seem to be compatible with the long-held assumption that the N400 and P600 appear to be modulated by the subject-object asymmetry, and were sensitive to, respectively, the semantic attraction between words in the sentences and, the congruency of the predicate. We thus claim that the syntactic anomalies blocked the detection of semantic anomalies, therefore, semantically incongruous sentences, such as role-reversals were perceived to be odd due to a syntactic constraint satisfaction that assigns the right theta-roles to the verbs arguments despite the semantic cues.