Syntax through the looking glass: A review on two-word linguistic processing across behavioral, neuroimaging and neurostimulation studies

Abstract

In recent years a growing number of studies on syntactic processing has employed basic two-word constructions (e.g., “the tree”) to characterize the fundamental aspects of linguistic composition. This large body of evidence allows, for the first time, to closely examine which cognitive processes and neural substrates support the combination of two syntactic units into a more complex one, mirroring the nature of combinatory operations described in theoretical linguistics. The present review comprehensively examines behavioural, neuroimaging and neurostimulation studies investigating basic syntactic composition, covering more than 40 years of psycho- and neuro-linguistic research. Across several paradigms, four key features of syntactic composition have emerged: (1) the rule-based and (2) automatic nature of the combinatorial process, (3) a central role of Broca’s area and the posterior temporal lobe in representing and combining syntactic features, and (4) the reliance on efficient bottom-up integration rather than top-down prediction.

Testing the automaticity of syntax using masked visual priming

“…However, we, here, refrain from using the terms subliminal and unconscious when addressing syntactic priming in the masked setting, and rather suggest a distinction between automatic (i.e., masked) and more-controlled (i.e., unmasked) syntactic priming. Indeed, the brief (33 ms, SOA = 49 ms) and masked presentation of the primes in our study prevents strategic control (Dehaene & Changeux, 2011), highlighting a highly automatic processing stage (see also Katz et al, 1987;Lukatela et al, 1982;Maran et al, 2022, for a discussion of the SOA manipulation in studies testing automatic priming effects).…”

“…At the word-category level, reduced response latencies to nouns and verbs primed by syntactically correct functional elements were reported in two studies conducted in English (Goodman et al, 1981;Seidenberg et al, 1984) and one study in French (Berkovitch & Dehaene, 2019). Together, these findings suggest that previous syntactic context, as short as single function words, can affect the processing of upcoming words (see also Maran et al, 2022, for a recent review). However, despite the extensive application of the paradigm to study syntactic contextual effects in the psycholinguistic literature, three main research questions remain open: the extent to which syntactic priming stems from automatic linguistic processes ( §1.1.…”

“…Neurophysiological data suggest that the extraction of syntactic information to build up syntactic structures is a highly speeded automatic process, as reflected in the earliness and task-independent nature of Event-Related Potential (ERP) components such as the Early Left Anterior Negativity (ELAN) and the syntactic Mismatch Negativity (sMMN) (Hahne & Friederici, 1999;Hanna et al, 2014;Hasting et al, 2007;Herrmann et al, 2009;Pulvermüller & Assadollahi, 2007;Pulvermüller & Shtyrov, 2003). One way to test behaviourally the automaticity of syntactic processing is to use priming paradigms in combination with masking techniques or very short stimulus-onset asynchronies (SOA) (Maran et al, 2022). The common rationale behind these two approaches is that, if the prime is presented for a very short amount of time (Colé & Segui, 1994;Katz et al, 1987;Lukatela et al, 1982) or perceived unconsciously (Ansorge et al, 2013;Berkovitch & Dehaene, 2019), participants will not be able to initiate strategic behaviour, therefore automatic processes will be highlighted.…”

“…Nonetheless, the presentation of a minimal syntactic context already triggers the analysis of the prime-target syntactic relationship, despite the fact that it is not required to perform grammatical categorization of the target word (see Faussart et al, 1999, andMaran et al, 2022, for a similar argumentation).…”

“…In particular, we use a two-word syntactic priming paradigm 1 to address the influence of minimal syntactic context (e.g., the determiner EIN (''the'') or the pronoun ER (''he'')) on the processing of upcoming nouns or verbs in German. A central aspect of this paradigm is that, by orthogonally manipulating the grammatical relationship between prime and target, it is possible to highlight syntactic processing while minimizing semantic confounds and working memory demands (Goodman et al, 1981;Maran et al, 2022). Previous syntactic priming manipulations focused either on the morpho-syntactic level, i.e., gender, number, and case agreement like ''she sings'' versus ''*she sing'' 2 (Carello et al, 1988;Gurjanov, Lukatela, Moskovljević, et al, 1985;Katz et al, 1987;Lukatela et al, 1982Lukatela et al, , 1983Lukatela et al, , 1987 or on the word-category level like ''she sings'' versus ''*she apple'' (Goodman et al, 1981;Seidenberg et al, 1984).…”