Prosodic Influence on the Processing of Bimorphemic and Trimorphemic [V+X] Sentences: An ERP Study

The relationship between prosody and syntax is an emerging topic in the field of linguistics. This study employs event-related potentials (ERP) technology to explore the impact of prosody on the syntactic acceptability of bimorphemic and trimorphemic [V+X] sentences. The experimental group consists of trimorphemic [V+X] sentences with prosodic violations, while the control group comprises bimorphemic [V+X] sentences. Furthermore, three types of erroneous sentences were constructed: those with syntactic violations, semantic violations, and prosody & semantic violations. The results show that all three types of erroneous sentences triggered a significant P600 effect, while semantic violation sentences triggered a significant N400 effect. Furthermore, the P600 effect triggered by prosodic violation sentences was consistent with that triggered by syntactic violation sentences. Therefore, this study speculates that the cognitive processing of prosodic violation sentences is similar to that of syntactic violation sentences and provides a plausible explanation for the influence of prosody on syntax.