The project focuses on the processing of Arabic sentence structures. It aims to shed light on how the brain constructs meaning out of Arabic sentences in real-time, and how the mechanisms involved are similar or different from processing other languages.
We specifically intend to examine tense & agreement, subject-verb, noun-adjective, reflexive-antecedent, determiner-noun, and noun-adjective agreement processing in healthy speakers, by manipulating linguistic factors such as word order, animacy, verb type, subject type, derivational nature of plurals and adjectives …etc.
This will be done through the Electroencephalogram (EEG). The EEG is the electrical activity of the human brain that can be recorded using electrodes fixed at the scalp. It includes the rhythmic variations in voltage that are elicited due to the various functions of the brain and the variations in voltage that directly reflect the response of the brain to various stimuli, including linguistic stimuli. These tiny changes are also known as ERPs (Event-Related Brain Potentials), which are time-locked to internal or external events or stimuli such as reading or hearing a word, looking at a picture, listening to a tone and so on.
Therefore, with the accuracy of their temporal resolution, ERPs allow us to study language processes as they unfold in real-time because the processing is being continuously recorded, and any word can be time-locked and the response to the stimulus can measured at all stages of processing.
