Processing Temporal Constraints and Some Implications for the Investigation of Second Language Sentence Processing and Acquisition. Commentary on Baggio

Baggio presents the results of an event-related potential (ERP) study in which he examines the processing consequences of reading tense violations such as ∗Afgelopen zondag lakt Vincent de kozijnen van zijn landhuis (∗“Last Sunday Vincent paints the window-frames of his country house”). The violation is arguably caused by a mismatch between the semantics of the temporal adverb in the topic position Afgelopen zondag, which refers to the past time, and the present tense semantic feature as expressed by the morphological marking on the verb lakt “paints.” Baggio reports that sentences with this type of tense violation elicited a left-anterior negativity (LAN) between 200 and 400 ms following the onset of the critical word (lakt), which was followed by a positive shift at about 700 ms (a so-called P600 effect), in comparison to conditions where there was no such temporal mismatch (Afgelopen zondag–lakte). Baggio’s formal semantic analysis of tense and temporal adverbs underlies his view of the parsing of such violations and his functional account of these ERP data. Essentially, tenses are considered to be integrity constraints, which serve as instructions to the processing system to update the discourse model in order to locate the situation that is being talked about in (past/present/future) time. The LAN effect is argued to reflect the disruption in the system’s attempt to satisfy the sentence’s constraints. Baggio also finds a negative-going waveform between about 400 and 700 ms following the onset of the final word in the tense violation condition, which he identifies as a sentence-final negativity (SFN). He argues that this SFN reflects the system’s readjustment of the sentence’s