CORRELATIVE CONJUNCTIONS AS SPACE BUILDERS: VIOLATION OF PARALLEL STRUCTURE OFFERS CORRELATIONAL SUPPORT FOR THE PSYCHOLOGICAL REALITY OF MENTAL SPACES

The paper aims to explore how violations of parallel structure in English correlative conjunctions affect participants’ response times (RTs) and accuracy ratings in an online incremental grammaticality judgment task, where correlative conjunctions are understood as space builders (i.e., each correlative conjunction is expected to yield a dual-space network). The study included 37 advanced EFL students from the University of Niš. The main experiment included 14 target sentences with 7 different correlative conjunctions, with the second part of a correlative conjunction missing. Stimuli were presented word-by-word, with a mask, in a self-paced moving windows paradigm. The relevant independent variables recorded in Open Sesame were RTs and response accuracy. The obtained results show increased RTs associated with error positions. Specifically, the analysis of the overall mean tendency across all items and over the entire sample showed significantly higher mean RTs in the error position compared to RTs in accurate sentence positions (p<.001). Moreover, the analysis of overall accuracy showed a significantly higher mean value of accurate responses for correct sentence parts compared to the sentence parts with an error (p=.006), and a significantly lower mean value of inaccurate responses in correct sentence parts compared to parts of sentences with errors (p=.015). By-item analyses showed higher counts of accurate responses in error positions, which also reached significance in most cases. The obtained results offer correlational support for the psychological reality of parallel structure and mental spaces.