An ERP study of ellipsis resolution in Korean

Park, Myung-Kwan and Chung, Wonil. 2018. An ERP study of ellipsis resolution in Korean. Language and Information, 22.1, 29-56. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the prediction/integration of syntactic structure during sentence processing, employing the construction that allows a TP ellipsis or Sluicing-like interpretation in Korean. To this aim we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) from Korean native speakers while they read ellipsis constructions where the syntactic context allows or disallows remnants/ survivors (mis)matching with their explicit/implicit correlates in terms of Case/case (postposition) particle, also reflecting voice (mis)match between the antecedent and the ellipsis clauses. The Korean speakers were able to predict clausal syntactic structure on the basis of the antecedent clause and integrate it into the ellipsis site, thereby quickly detecting voice match/mismatch, as suggested by an ERP difference between matched and mismatched remnants/survivors neighboring the ellipsis site.