Finding needles in haystacks: Symbolic resonance analysis of event-related potentials unveils different processing demands

Abstract

Previous ERP studies have found an N400-P600 pattern in sentences in which the number of arguments does not match the number of arguments that the verb can take. In the present study, we elaborate on this question by investigating whether the case of the mismatching object argument in German (accusative/direct object versus dative/indirect object) affects processing differently. In general, both types of mismatches elicited a biphasic N400-P600 response in the ERP. However, traditional voltage average analysis was unable to reveal differences between the two mismatching conditions, that is, between a mismatching accusative versus dative. Therefore, we employed a recently developed method on ERP data analysis, the symbolic resonance analysis (SRA), where EEG epochs are symbolically encoded in sequences of three symbols depending on a given parameter, the encoding threshold. We found a larger proportion of threshold crossing events with negative polarity in the N400 time window for a mismatching dative argument compared to a mismatching accusative argument. By contrast, the proportion of threshold crossing events with positive polarity was smaller for dative in the P600 time window. We argue that this difference is due to the phenomenon of bfree dativeQ in German. This result also shows that the SRA provides a useful tool for revealing ERP differences that cannot be discovered using the traditional voltage average analysis. D 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.Theme: Neural basis of behavior Topic: Cognition

Towards dynamical system models of language-related brain potentials

“…According to Coles and Rugg (1995, p. 23), ''the N400 appears to be a 'default' component, evoked by words whose meaning is unrelated to, or not predicted by, the prior context of the words'' (Dambacher et al 2006). This view is further supported by recent experimental findings on N400s evoked by purely semantic and thematic-syntactic manipulations (Frisch and Schlesewsky 2001;Bornkessel et al 2004;Frisch and beim Graben 2005;beim Graben et al 2005). For example, in the (extended) Argument Dependency Model (eADM) of Bornkessel and Schlesewsky (2006), the N400 reflects a mismatch with previous prominence information held in working memory (eADM is discussed in section ''Introduction/Phenomenological models'').…”

Detecting Wrong Notes in Advance: Neuronal Correlates of Error Monitoring in Pianists

“…Consequently, as a second analysis we used a coarse-graining method, the symbolic resonance analysis (SRA), to disentangle possible overlapping brain responses (Beim Graben and Kurths 2003), and validate the ERP analysis. The SRA has been demonstrated to detect ERP differences between conditions which cannot be discovered by the traditional voltage average, although differences in processing are theoretically expected (Frisch and beim Graben 2005;Beim Graben et al 2007). Furthermore, this method performs optimally when there is a small number of trials, as in our experiment, by increasing the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).…”

Detecting event-related recurrences by symbolic analysis: applications to human language processing

“…In this section, we reanalyse an ERP experiment on the processing of ungrammaticalities in German [70] (see [71][72][73][74] for other studies on symbolic dynamics of language-related brain potentials). Frisch et al [70] examined processing differences for different violations of lexical and grammatical rules.…”