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On the temporal determinants of ERP effects to syntactic violations

Anna S. Hasting1* and S.A Kotz1
  • 1 Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Germany

A common finding in the ERP literature on syntax processing is that word category violations are detected within 150 ms, as reflected in the early left anterior negativity (ELAN) effect (Neville et al., 1991; Friederici et al., 1993). In contrast, subject-verb agreement violations are usually reported to elicit a somewhat later left anterior negativity (LAN) between 300 and 500 ms (Kutas & Hillyard, 1983; Osterhout & Mobley, 1995). Based on this pattern of results, a current neurocognitive model of auditory sentence comprehension (Friederici, 2002) postulates that phrase structure building and syntactic-relational processing, being disrupted by word category violations and subject-verb agreement violations, respectively, take place in two temporally consecutive processing stages. However, a growing number of studies reporting syntactic modulations of the mismatch negativity (MMN) in response subject-verb agreement violations (Pulvermüller & Shtyrov, 2003; Shtyrov et al., 2003; Pulvermüller et al., 2008) suggest that the assignment of syntactic-relational processing to a temporally fixed processing stage may be premature. The fact that such syntactic MMN effects invariably occur well before 200 ms points at the possibility that the type of the syntactic violation may not be the crucial factor for the timing of the ERP effects. In the set of experiments presented here, we therefore scrutinize a number of methodological and linguistic factors that have not been explicitly considered in previous investigations. By timelocking the ERPs precisely to the violation point of the speech stimuli, we show that local subject-verb agreement violations elicit reliable negativities with onset latencies as early as 100 ms, even outside the repetitive MMN oddball paradigm and independent of task effects. Furthermore, we discuss possible influences of the locality of the violation in terms of both working memory and sentence structure accounts, as well as the role of sentence context in general. Finally, we elaborate on the implications of our findings for the abovementioned neurocognitive model of auditory sentence comprehension.

References

1. Friederici, A. D. (2002). Towards a neural basis of auditory sentence processing. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6, 78-84.

2. Friederici, A. D., Pfeifer, E., & Hahne, A. (1993). Event-related brain potentials during natural speech processing: Effects of semantic, morphological and syntactic violations. Cognitive Brain Research, 1, 183-192.

3. Kutas, M., & Hillyard, S. A. (1983). Event-related brain potentials to grammatical errors and semantic anomalies. Memory & Cognition, 11, 539-550.

4. Neville, H., Nicol, J. L., Barss, A., Forster, K. I., & Garrett, M. F. (1991). Syntactically based sentence processing classes: Evidence from event-related brain potentials. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 3, 151-165.

5. Osterhout, L., & Mobley, L. A. (1995). Event-related brain potentials elicited by failure to agree. Journal of Memory and Language, 34, 739-773.

6. Pulvermüller, F., & Shtyrov, Y. (2003). Automatic processing of grammar in the human brain as revealed by the mismatch negativity. NeuroImage, 20, 159-172.

7. Pulvermüller, F., Shtyrov, Y., Hasting, A. S., & Carlyon, R. P. (2008). Syntax as a reflex: Neurophysiological evidence for early automaticity of grammatical processing. Brain and Language, 104, 244-253.

8. Shtyrov, Y., Pulvermüller, F., Näätänen, R., & Ilmoniemi, R. (2003). Grammar processing outside the focus of attention: An MEG study. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 15, 1195-1206.

Conference: 10th International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience, Bodrum, Türkiye, 1 Sep - 5 Sep, 2008.

Presentation Type: Oral Presentation

Topic: Language

Citation: Hasting AS and Kotz S (2008). On the temporal determinants of ERP effects to syntactic violations. Conference Abstract: 10th International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience. doi: 10.3389/conf.neuro.09.2009.01.224

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Received: 08 Dec 2008; Published Online: 08 Dec 2008.

* Correspondence: Anna S Hasting, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany, hasting@cbs.mpg.de