Processing of Ergativity

This project investigates how Shipibo-Konibo speakers use grammatical features of their language to rapidly create a model of an event during sentence processing. The project specifically explores the use of the ergative case, which is used to mark the agent (the participant in the event who causes or performs the action). Ergativity has been systematically overlooked in psycholinguistic studies, mainly because commonly studied, industrialized, majority languages do not exhibit ergative constructions. The project on ergativity processing focuses on the origin of subject preference and ergative case alignment using psycholinguistic experiments. Data is expected to be collected using eye-tracking techniques (recording eye movements as participants look at and describe images on a screen), EEG (measuring the electrophysiological signal of brain activity as it reaches the skull), and production (asking speakers to form sentences). Funded by the University of Zurich. Research Areas: Experimental Psycholinguistics