Research in executive function development has shown that children have poor control of inhibition functions, including the inhibition of prepotent responses, control of attention, and flexibility at rule‐shifting. To date, links between the development of executive function and children's language development have not been investigated explicitly. Yet, recent studies on children's sentence processing report that children tend to perseverate during sentence processing. We argue that such perseveration may be due to immature executive function.
In this study, two event-related potential experiments were conducted to investigate whether readers adapt their expectations to morphosyntactically (Experiment 1) or semantically (Experiment 2) anomalous sentences when they are repeatedly exposed to them. To address this issue, we experimentally manipulated the probability of occurrence of grammatical sentences and syntactically and semantically anomalous sentences through experiments. For the low probability block, anomalous sentences were presented less frequently than grammatical sentences (with a ratio of 1 to 4), while they were presented as frequently as grammatical sentences in the equal probability block. Experiment 1 revealed a smaller P600 effect for morphosyntactic violations in the equal probability block than in the low probability block. Linear mixed-effects models were used to examine how the size of the P600 effect changed as the experiment went along. The results showed that the smaller P600 effect of the equal probability block resulted from an amplitude’s decline in morphosyntactically violated sentences over the course of the experiment, suggesting an adaptation to morphosyntactic violations. In Experiment 2, semantically anomalous sentences elicited a larger N400 effect than their semantically natural counterparts regardless of probability manipulation. Little evidence was found in favour of adaptation to semantic violations in that the processing cost associated with the N400 did not decrease over the course of the experiment. Therefore, a dynamic aspect of language-processing system was demonstrated in this study. We will discuss why the language-processing system shows a selective adaptation to morphosyntactic violations.
Previous studies on reanalysis in sentence processing have shown that the processing load of reanalysis increases in proportion to the difficulty in revising the existing structure. The present study, on the other hand, argues that the processing load of reanalysis also increases when the pragmatic plausibility of the interpretation of the revised structure turns out to be pragmatically less plausible. This paper reports the results of two experiments: The results of Experiment 1 (a self-paced reading study) indicate that the pragmatically less plausible interpretation of the revised structure immediately affects the processing load of the reanalysis. Experiment 2 further addresses the issue of the immediate impact of the effect of the pragmatic plausibility by recording event-related brain potentials (ERPs). The results revealed that a large N400 effect was observed at the pragmatically less plausible words, while the response to the effect of the structural revision resulted in a P600 effect. Furthermore, we found the nearly perfect linear summation between the N400 and P600 effects, suggesting that the difficulty in the pragmatic integration process did not affect the difficulty in the structural revision process. In addition, we found that the onset of the P600 effect reflecting the cost of revising the existing structure was relatively earlier than that of the N400 effect reflecting the pragmatic implausibility. The present study provides us with some implications for a theory of reanalysis and consideration of the time course of reanalysis.
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