The Processing of Temporal Concord in Sentences: An ERP Investigation into the Role of Adverb - Verb Distance

The processing of temporal concord anomalies (e.g., Last week/*Tomorrow I bought a car) has been rather understudied compared to the processing of other agreement relations. Moreover, previous event-related potential (ERP) studies investigating temporal concord violations reported quite heterogeneous findings. One crucial aspect that was not kept constant across studies was the linear distance between the verb and the adverb. After providing a review of the previous ERP literature investigating agreement relations in general and temporal concord in particular, we present and discuss new ERP data on the processing of temporal concord in Italian. In particular, we investigated whether adverb-verb linear distance affects the processing of temporal anomalies. Our results show that adverb-verb distance affects the amplitude of late components (P600, SFN) elicited by temporal concord violations in Italian. We conclude that distance plays a role during the processing of temporal concord, in particular during stages of reanalysis.