Brain potentials and syntactic violations revisited: no evidence for specificity of the syntactic positive shift

Münte, Thomas F.; Heinze, Hans‐Jochen; Matzke, Mike; Wieringa, Bernardina M.; Johannes, Sönke

doi:10.1016/s0028-3932(97)00119-x

Cited by 183 publications

(131 citation statements)

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“…Note that recently, also P600 effects (a posterior positivity peaking around 600 ms) which are often associated with syntactic/structural processing (Kaan, & Swaab, 2003;Friederici, 2002;Hagoort, Brown, & Groothusen, 1993;Osterhout, & Holcomb, 1992) have been reported in response to semantic manipulations in sentence processing (Kolk, & Chwilla, 2007;Kolk, Chwilla, Van Herten, & Oor, 2003;Münte, Heinze, Matzke, Wieringa, & Johannes, 1998). For example, Kolk et al (2003) presented syntactically well-formed sentences (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Electrophysiological evidence for incremental lexical-semantic integration in auditory compound comprehension

2009

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The present study investigated the time-course of semantic integration in auditory compound word processing. Compounding is a productive mechanism of word formation that is used frequently in many languages. Specifically, we examined whether semantic integration is incremental or is delayed until the head, the last constituent in German, is available. Stimuli were compounds consisting of three nouns, and the semantic plausibility of the second and the third constituent was manipulated independently (high vs. low). Participants' task was to listen to the compounds and evaluate them semantically. Event-related brain potentials in response to the head constituents showed an increased N400 for less plausible head constituents, reflecting the lexical-semantic integration of all three compound constituents. In response to the second (less plausible) constituents, an increased N400 with a central-left scalp distribution was observed followed by a parietal positivity. The occurrence of this N400 effect during the presentation of the second constituents suggests that the initial two non-head constituents are immediately integrated. The subsequent positivity might be an instance of a P600 and is suggested to reflect the structural change of the initially constructed compound structure. The results suggest that lexical-semantic integration of compound constituents is an incremental process and, thus, challenge a recent proposal on the time-course of semantic processing in auditory compound comprehension.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Electrophysiological evidence for incremental lexical-semantic integration in auditory compound comprehension

2009

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“…This prediction is based on the known sensitivity of the P600 to violations of phrase structure (Neville, Nicol, Barss, Forster, & Garrett, 1991;Osterhout & Holcomb, 1992;Hagoort, Brown, & Groothusen, 1993), to syntactic integration difficulty (Kaan, Harris, Gibson, & Holcomb, 2000;Fiebach, Schlesewsky, & Friederici, 2002), and to any kind of linguistic parsing difficulty, whether it be induced by morphosyntactic, semantic, or even orthographic violations (Münte, Heinze, Matzke, Wieringa, & Johannes, 1998).…”

Section: Misalignment Of Syntactic Focus Position With An Unfocused Ementioning

confidence: 99%

Violations of information structure: An electrophysiological study of answers to wh-questions

et al. 2007

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This study investigates brain responses to violations of information structure in wh-questionanswer pairs, with particular emphasis on violations of focus assignment in it-clefts (It was the queen that silenced the banker). Two types of ERP responses in answers to wh-questions were found. First, all words in the focus-marking (cleft) position elicited a large positivity (P3b) characteristic of sentence-final constituents, as did the final words of these sentences, which suggests that focused elements may trigger integration effects like those seen at sentence end. Second, the focusing of an inappropriate referent elicited a smaller, N400-like effect. The results show that comprehenders actively use structural focus cues and discourse-level restrictions during online sentence processing. These results, based on visual stimuli, were different from the brain response to auditory focus violations indicated by pitch-accent (Hruska et al. 2000), but similar to brain responses to newly introduced discourse referents (Bornkessel et al. 2003). This paper examines the contribution of information structure to sentence processing by investigating what kinds of ERP responses are elicited when focus is incorrectly assigned via syntactic structure. For example, the answers that speakers give to wh-questions of the kind shown in (1) are constrained not only in terms of their propositional content, but also in terms of how that content is packaged. (1a) is an acceptable (if somewhat verbose) answer to the question while (1b) is not, in spite of the fact that both answers provide the same information, namely that the agent of lettuce-eating was the rabbits.(1) What ate the lettuce in your garden, the deer or the rabbits? a. It was the rabbits that ate the lettuce.b. #It was the lettuce that the rabbits ate. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author ManuscriptThe critical difference, then, lies not in the content of the answer, but in the form in which it is presented.This simple example shows that answers to wh-questions are constrained by information structure, namely the division of content into topic and focus. The informative part of an answer to a wh-question must present new or newly activated information, and thus have focus status. Cleft constructions in particular, like those shown in (1a) and (1b), provide a means of identifying the element in the clefted position as focus (e.g. Rochemont 1986;Lambrecht, 2001), and this is indicated in the example by means of underlining.Knowing the nature of the brain's response to information structure violations can give us a better understanding of the processes that underlie the comprehension of information structure categories like focus; it can also provide insight into the functional significance of the brain response that is elicited. For example, if the answers to wh-questions that violate focus constraints were to elicit an increase in N400 amplitude (Kutas & Hillyard, 1980), this would provide evidence that the N400 is sensitive not only to lexi...

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“…The P600 is evoked by a number of different syntactic manipulations such as violations of agreement (Hagoort, Brown, & Groothusen, 1993;Osterhout & Mobley, 1995;Vos, Gunter, Kolk, & Mulder, 2001), of verb inflection (Friederici, Pfeifer, & Hahne, 1993;Gunter, Stowe, & Mulder, 1997), of case inflection (Münte, Heinze, Matzke, Wieringa, & Johannes, 1998), of pronoun inflection (Coulson, King, & Kutas, 1998), of phrase structure (Friederici et al, 1993;Hahne & Friederici, 1999;Neville, Nicol, Barss, Forster, & Garrett, 1991), of case marking (Coulson et al, 1998;Friederici & Frisch, 2000;Frisch & Schlesewsky, 2001, 2005, and of verb-argument structure (Friederici & Frisch, 2000;Frisch, Hahne, & Friederici, 2004;Osterhout, Holcomb, & Swinney, 1994).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

ERPs reveal comparable syntactic sentence processing in native and non-native readers of English

2008

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L2 syntactic processing has been primarily investigated in the context of syntactic anomaly detection, but only sparsely with syntactic ambiguity. In the field of event-related potentials (ERPs) syntactic anomaly detection and syntactic ambiguity resolution is linked to the P600. The current ERP experiment examined L2 syntactic processing in highly proficient L1 Spanish-L2 English readers who had acquired English informally around the age of 5 years. Temporary syntactic ambiguity (induced by verb subcategorization information) was tested as a language-specific phenomenon of L2, while syntactic anomaly resulted from phrase structure constraints that are similar in L1 and L2. Participants judged whether a sentence was syntactically acceptable or not. Native readers of English showed a P600 in the temporary syntactically ambiguous and syntactically anomalous sentences. A comparable picture emerged in the non-native readers of English. Both critical syntactic conditions elicited a P600, however, the distribution and latency of the P600 varied in the syntactic anomaly condition. The results clearly show that early acquisition of L2 syntactic knowledge leads to comparable online sensitivity towards temporal syntactic ambiguity and syntactic anomaly in early and highly proficient non-native readers of English and native readers of English.

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Brain potentials and syntactic violations revisited: no evidence for specificity of the syntactic positive shift

Cited by 183 publications

References 39 publications

Electrophysiological evidence for incremental lexical-semantic integration in auditory compound comprehension

Electrophysiological evidence for incremental lexical-semantic integration in auditory compound comprehension

Violations of information structure: An electrophysiological study of answers to wh-questions

ERPs reveal comparable syntactic sentence processing in native and non-native readers of English

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