Figure 2

Temporal events in a demo or task trial. (a) In the demo trials, a Kazakh sentence [either grammatical or ungrammatical] was presented auditorily, followed by an NV pair [either matched or mismatched with the two SV pairs in the sentence structure; underlined words denote such a mismatch]. In each NV pair, the noun (or pronoun) was presented always without a suffix for the accusative case (e.g., adam for adamdï), and the verb was presented always with a third-person singular suffix in the simple past tense. The + / − sign presented simultaneously with a sentence indicated its grammaticality/ungrammaticality, and the + / − sign with an NV pair indicated match/mismatch (see above). The sentence shown in the figure means “We recognized a man who knew John.” (b) In the task trials, five Kazakh words (“Lexical list” in the figure) were presented auditorily; individual words translated into English were visually presented. This Lexical list was followed by a sentence using all five words from the Lexical list. The participants chose a + / − button in a grammaticality task (GR task). An NV pair was then presented to the participants asking them to judge the correctness of matching (see above). Here again, the participants chose a + / − button in a subject-verb task (SV task). In the activation analyses, we focused on the temporal events of the Sentence and NV pair in the task trials alone.