Delangiz Dalir, Mehdi Purmohammad, Arsalan Golfam, Reza Khosroabadi, Mahnaz Karbalai Sadegh,
Volume 0, Issue 0 (2-2024)
Abstract
In the Persian language, which follows the SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) word order, the interrogative complement or prepositional object usually appears after the object in the focal position. However, it is possible to move this phrase to other positions within the sentence. The aim of this study is to investigate the processing of interrogative complement displacement in Persian using Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) based on Friederici's syntactic processing model. This study focuses on the central-parietal region of the brain, specifically the N400 and P600 components, which, according to Friederici's language processing model (1995), examine the filler-gap dependency structure and the mental representation of these phrases. Four different positions of the interrogative complement in Persian were examined, and 50 sentences were constructed for each condition.. The results indicate that the displacement of the interrogative complement leads to different brain responses, with an increase in N400 amplitude in the central-parietal region when the interrogative complement follows the subject, and an increase in P600 amplitude in the initial or focal position of the interrogative complement. These findings suggest that the displacement of the wh-complement in Persian, according to Friederici's model, has a neurophysiological basis and may represent a filler-gap dependency structure in mental representation.
