Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This study used ERP method to investigate the processing of fictive motion and literal motion during natural languagecomprehension. A hypothesis is that the motion component of a verb is preserved in both literal and fictive motion con-structions (The army/The bridge crossed the river). However, the incorporation of a motion-event frame into fictive motionconstructions requires reanalysis or reconstruction both syntactically and semantically. The ERP results reveal that a P300effect on the subject NPs, a P600 effect on the motion verbs and an N400 modulation on the sentence-final complementNPs were uncovered in the processing of fictive motion constructions in relative to literal motion constructions. Theseresults suggest that the processing of fictive motion requires increased cognitive effort than the processing of literal motioncondition.