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. 2020 May 5;10:7537. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-64375-9

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© The Author(s) 2020

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Example of auditory l stimuli presented to the subject. Languages may contain homophonous sequences. i.e. strings of words with the same sound and different syntactic structure. For example, in Italian, the very same sequence of phonems [laˈpɔrta] may have two completely different meanings and two different syntactic structures: (i) LA (the) PORTA (door) as in PULISCE LA PORTA CON L’ACQUA (s/he cleans the door with water). (ii) LA (her) PORTA (brings) as in DOMANI LA PORTA A CASA (tomorrow s/he brings her home). In the first sequence [laˈpɔrta] (written here as: la porta) is a Noun Phrase: the article la (the) precedes the noun porta (door). In the second sequence, instead, the very same sequence is a Verb Phrase: the object clitic pronoun la (her) precedes the verb porta (brings) which governs it. The difference is not only reflected in the distinct lexical classes, there is also a major syntactic difference: in the case of the noun phrase the element preceding the noun, namely the article, is base generated in that position; in the case of the verb phrase, instead, the element preceding the verb in the acoustic stimulus, namely the clitic pronoun, is based generated on the right of the verb occupying the canonical position of complements and then displaced to a preverbal position. This fundamental syntactic difference is represented in the syntactic trees in the picture: “t” indicates the position where the pronoun is base generated in the VP. Notably, to exclude phonological or prosodical factors which may distinguish the two types of phrases, in our experiment the exact copy of the pronunciation of one phrase replaced the other in either sentence in the acoustic stimuli. In other words, subjects heard the very same acoustic stimulus for each homophonous phrase.