The P600 as an index of syntactic integration difficulty

Kaan, Edith; Harris, Anthony; Gibson, Edward; Holcomb, Phillip J.

doi:10.1080/016909600386084

Cited by 688 publications

(594 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…Several alternative functional accounts of the P600 component have been proposed. For example, the P600 is often thought to index syntactic integration and, accordingly, is mainly found in studies with sentential contexts (Kaan, Harris, Gibson & Holcomb, 2000). In the present study, there was no extended context to induce syntactic integration.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 36%

Sustained meaning activation for polysemous but not homonymous words: Evidence from EEG

2015

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Theoretical linguistic accounts of lexical ambiguity distinguish between homonymy, where words that share a lexical form have unrelated meanings, and polysemy, where the meanings are related. The present study explored the psychological reality of this theoretical assumption by asking whether there is evidence that homonyms and polysemes are represented and processed differently in the brain. We investigated the time-course of meaning activation of different types of ambiguous words using EEG. Homonyms and polysemes were each further subdivided into two: unbalanced homonyms (e.g., "coach") and balanced homonyms (e.g., "match"); metaphorical polysemes (e.g., "mouth") and metonymic polysemes (e.g., "rabbit"). These four types of ambiguous words were presented as primes in a visual single-word priming delayed lexical decision task employing a long ISI (750 ms).Targets were related to one of the meanings of the primes, or were unrelated. ERPs formed relative to the target onset indicated that the theoretical distinction between homonymy and polysemy was reflected in the N400 brain response. For targets following homonymous primes (both unbalanced and balanced), no effects survived at this long ISI indicating that both meanings of the prime had already decayed. On the other hand, for polysemous primes (both metaphorical and metonymic), activation was observed for both dominant and subordinate senses. The observed processing differences between homonymy and polysemy provide evidence in support of differential neuro-cognitive representations for the two types of ambiguity. We argue that the polysemous senses act collaboratively to strengthen the representation, facilitating maintenance, while the competitive nature of homonymous meanings leads to decay.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 36%

Sustained meaning activation for polysemous but not homonymous words: Evidence from EEG

2015

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“…We hypothesize that one aspect is related to the complexity of syntactic processing. Whenever the complexity of the structural integration process increases, a P600/ SPS is observed [15]. This account is supported by the ®nding that whenever the syntactic manipulation is not in the form of a straightforward violation but implicates di erences in syntactic complexity [1,12] the distribution of the P600/SPS is more frontal than in the case of a straightforward grammatical violation.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 82%

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

2000

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In this study, event-related brain potential e ects of speech processing are obtained and compared to similar e ects in sentence reading. In two experiments sentences were presented that contained three di erent types of grammatical violations. In one experiment sentences were presented word by word at a rate of four words per second. The grammatical violations elicited a Syntactic Positive Shift (P600/SPS), 500 ms after the onset of the word that rendered the sentence ungrammatical. The P600/SPS consisted of two phases, an early phase with a relatively equal anterior±posterior distribution and a later phase with a strong posterior distribution. We interpret the ®rst phase as an indication of structural integration complexity, and the second phase as an indication of failing parsing operations and/or an attempt at reanalysis. In the second experiment the same syntactic violations were presented in sentences spoken at a normal rate and with normal intonation. These violations elicited a P600/SPS with the same onset as was observed for the reading of these sentences. In addition two of the three violations showed a preceding frontal negativity, most clearly over the left hemisphere. 7

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“…The P600 has been argued to reflect syntactic integration (e.g., Kaan, Harris, Gibson, and Holcomb, 2000), reanalysis Examining Morphological Variability in L2 Learners 12 (e.g., Osterhout and Holcomb, 1992) and repair (e.g., Barber and Carreiras, 2005;see Molinaro, Barber, and Carreiras, 2011 for a review). Importantly, although the P600 is not exclusively linked to morphosyntactic processing (i.e., it has been reported for certain types of semantic violations; see Bornkessel-Schlesewsky & Schlesewsky, 2008;Kim & Osterhout, 2005), it is consistently found for morphosyntactic errors in native speakers.…”

Section: The Present Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Morphological variability in second language learners: An examination of electrophysiological and production data.

Bañón¹,

Miller²,

Rothman³

2017

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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We examined sources of morphological variability in second language (L2) learners of Spanish whose native language (L1) is English, with a focus on L1-L2 similarity, morphological markedness, and knowledge type (receptive vs. expressive). Experiment 1 uses event-related potentials to examine noun-adjective number (present in L1) and gender agreement (absent in L1) in online sentence comprehension (receptive knowledge). For each feature, markedness was manipulated, such that half of the critical noun-adjective combinations were feminine (marked) and the other half were masculine; half were used in the plural (marked) and the other half were used in the singular. With this setup, we examined learners' potential overreliance on unmarked forms or "defaults" (singular/masculine). Experiment 2 examines similar dependencies in spoken sentence production (expressive knowledge). Learners (n ϭ 22) performed better with number than gender overall, but their brain responses to both features were qualitatively native-like (i.e., P600), even though gender was probed with nouns that do not provide strong distributional cues to gender. In addition, variability with gender agreement was better accounted for by lexical (as opposed to syntactic) aspects. Learners showed no advantage for comprehension over production, and no systematic evidence of reliance on morphological defaults, although their online processing was sensitive to markedness in a native-like manner. Overall, these results suggest that there is facilitation for L2 properties that exist in the L1 and that markedness impacts L2 processing, but in a native-like manner. These results also speak against proposals arguing that adult L2ers have deficits at the level of the morphology or the syntax.

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The P600 as an index of syntactic integration difficulty

Cited by 688 publications

References 45 publications

Sustained meaning activation for polysemous but not homonymous words: Evidence from EEG

Sustained meaning activation for polysemous but not homonymous words: Evidence from EEG

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

Morphological variability in second language learners: An examination of electrophysiological and production data.

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