On the Language Specificity of the Brain Response to Syntactic Anomalies: Is the Syntactic Positive Shift a Member of the P300 Family?

Abstract

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 13 scalp electrodes while subjects read sentences, some of which contained either a verb that disagreed in number with the subject noun (syntactic anomaly) or a word in uppercase letters (physical anomaly). Uppercase words elicited the P300 complex of positivities, whereas agreement violations elicited a late positive shift with an onset around 500 msec and a duration of several hundred msec. These effects differed in their morphology, temporal course, amplitude, and scalp distribution. Furthermore, manipulations of the probability-of-occurrence and task relevance of the anomalies had robust effects on the response to uppercase words, but not on the response to agreement violations. Finally, these anomalies had additive effects when agreement-violating uppercase (doubly anomalous) words were presented. These results are taken to be an initial indication that the positive shift elicited by agreement violations is distinct from the P300 response to unexpected, task-relevant anomalies that do not involve the violation of a grammatical rule.

ERP effects of listening to speech compared to reading: the P600/SPS to syntactic violations in spoken sentences and rapid serial visual presentation

“…Although these two aspects of the P600/SPS have not been reported before, reanalysis of our earlier data [11] and inspection of the waveforms of other P600/ SPS studies [26,28], clearly support our observation in this study of the P600/SPS being a complex consisting of more than one aspect of the parsing process. We hypothesize that one aspect is related to the complexity of syntactic processing.…”

Expecting Gender: An Event Related Brain Potential Study on the Role of Grammatical Gender in Comprehending a Line Drawing Within a Written Sentence in Spanish

“…The ease of appreciation, relevance or use of the information provided at the mismatch may differ considerably when integrating a picture or a word into a written sentence context. As mentioned previously, some researchers maintain that the P600 to the target word indicates that an individual is forced to reprocess the sentence in order to make the target fit the incorrect structure (e.g., Osterhout et al, 1996). Others in contrast have argued that it is the recognition or surprise value of the error itself, or the inability to fully integrate the target into the context, that leads to the P600 (e.g., Coulson et al, 1998;Patel et al, 1998).…”

“…Such positivities are presumed to index syntactic processing or reprocessing (e.g., Osterhout et al, 1996) or in a more domain-general view the recognition of a task-related anomaly (e.g., Coulson et al, 1998;Patel et al, 1998). Another possible outcome would be the elicitation of a greater negativity to gender mismatches over frontal sites (i.e., a so-called left anterior negativity or LAN).…”

The interplay between semantic and referential aspects of anaphoric noun phrase resolution: Evidence from ERPs

“…First, the current late positive ERP effects may be related to the P300 ERP response, a domain-general response to task-relevant events (Coulson, King, & Kutas, 1998;Pritchard, 1981; but see Osterhout & Hagoort, 1999;Osterhout, McKinnon, Bersick, & Corey, 1996). Although we did not give participants an explicit task, it is possible that they, in addition to the 'normal' task of language comprehension, perceived the anaphors to be relevant to an implicit task (e.g., judging the acceptability of anaphoric expressions).…”