The P600 as an index of syntactic integration difficulty

The P600 component in Event Related Potential research has been hypothesised to be associated with syntactic reanalysis processes. We, however, propose that the P600 is not restricted to reanalysis processes, but reflects difficulty with syntactic integration processes in general. First we discuss this integration hypothesis in terms of a sentence processing model proposed elsewhere. Next, in Experiment 1, we show that the P600 is elicited in grammatical, non-garden path sentences in which integration is more difficult (i.e., ''who'' questions) relative to a control sentence (''whether'' questions). This effect is replicated in Experiment 2. Furthermore, we directly compare the effect of difficult integration in grammatical sentences to the effect of agreement violations. The results suggest that the positivity elicited in ''who'' questions and the P600-effect elicited by agreement violations have partly overlapping neural generators. This supports the hypothesis that similar cognitive processes, i.e., integration, are involved in both first pass analysis of ''who'' questions and dealing with ungrammaticalities (reanalysis).

[1]  S. Geisser,et al.  On methods in the analysis of profile data , 1959 .

[2]  E. Donchin.  Presidential address, 1980. Surprise!...Surprise? , 1981, Psychophysiology.

[3]  Mark Steedman,et al.  The use of context by the psychological parser , 1981 .

[4]  M. Kutas,et al.  Brain potentials during reading reflect word expectancy and semantic association , 1984, Nature.

[5]  C. C. Wood,et al.  Scalp distributions of event-related potentials: an ambiguity associated with analysis of variance models. , 1985, Electroencephalography and clinical neurophysiology.

[6]  Laurie A. Stowe,et al.  Parsing WH-constructions: Evidence for on-line gap location , 1986 .

[7]  Mark Steedman,et al.  Interaction with context during human sentence processing , 1988, Cognition.

[8]  Susan M. Garnsey,et al.  Evoked potentials and the study of sentence comprehension , 1989, Journal of psycholinguistic research.

[9]  Susan M. Garnsey,et al.  Evidence for the immediate use of verb control information in sentence processing , 1990 .

[10]  Guglielmo Cinque,et al.  Types of Ā-dependencies , 1990 .

[11]  M. Garrett,et al.  Syntactically Based Sentence Processing Classes: Evidence from Event-Related Brain Potentials , 1991, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[12]  Marica de Vincenzi,et al.  Syntactic parsing strategies in Italian , 1991 .

[13]  M. Kutas,et al.  Influences of semantic and syntactic context on open- and closed-class words , 1991, Memory & cognition.

[14]  H. Neville,et al.  Fractionating language: different neural subsystems with different sensitive periods. , 1992, Cerebral cortex.

[15]  P. Holcomb,et al.  Event-related brain potentials elicited by syntactic anomaly , 1992 .

[16]  Colin M. Brown,et al.  The syntactic positive shift (sps) as an erp measure of syntactic processing , 1993 .

[17]  Robert Kluender,et al.  Subjacency as a processing phenomenon , 1993 .

[18]  M. Kutas,et al.  Bridging the Gap: Evidence from ERPs on the Processing of Unbounded Dependencies , 1993, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[19]  Hans-Jochen Heinze,et al.  Dissociation of Brain Activity Related to Syntactic and Semantic Aspects of Language , 1993, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[20]  A. Friederici,et al.  Event-related brain potentials during natural speech processing: effects of semantic, morphological and syntactic violations. , 1993, Brain research. Cognitive brain research.

[21]  J. Kounios,et al.  Concreteness effects in semantic processing: ERP evidence supporting dual-coding theory. , 1994, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[22]  Maryellen C. MacDonald,et al.  The lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution , 1994 .

[23]  Susan M. Garnsey,et al.  Semantic Influences On Parsing: Use of Thematic Role Information in Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution , 1994 .

[24]  D. Swinney,et al.  Brain potentials elicited by garden-path sentences: evidence of the application of verb information during parsing. , 1994, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[25]  Suzanne Stevenson,et al.  Competition and recency in a hybrid network model of syntactic disambiguation , 1994 .

[26]  G. Hickok,et al.  Representation, Referentiality, and Processing in Agrammatic Comprehension : Two Case Studies , 1995, Brain and Language.

[27]  L. Osterhout,et al.  Event-Related Brain Potentials Elicited by Failure to Agree , 1995 .

[28]  N. Birbaumer,et al.  Electrocortical distinction of vocabulary types. , 1995, Electroencephalography and clinical neurophysiology.

[29]  A. Friederici.  The Time Course of Syntactic Activation During Language Processing: A Model Based on Neuropsychological and Neurophysiological Data , 1995, Brain and Language.

[30]  M. Kutas,et al.  Who Did What and When? Using Word- and Clause-Level ERPs to Monitor Working Memory Usage in Reading , 1995, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[31]  Michael D. Rugg,et al.  The ERP and cognitive psychology: Conceptual issues. , 1995 .

[32]  Michael K. Tanenhaus,et al.  Verb Argument Structure in Parsing and Interpretation: Evidence from wh-Questions , 1995 .

[33]  Lee Osterhout,et al.  Constraints on Movement Phenomena in Sentence Processing: Evidence from Event-related Brain Potentials , 1996 .

[34]  Vicka R. Corey,et al.  On the Language Specificity of the Brain Response to Syntactic Anomalies: Is the Syntactic Positive Shift a Member of the P300 Family? , 1996, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[35]  J. Trueswell.  THE ROLE OF LEXICAL FREQUENCY IN SYNTACTIC AMBIGUITY RESOLUTION , 1996 .

[36]  Emanuel Donchin,et al.  The varieties of deviant experience: ERP manifestations of deviance processors , 1997 .

[37]  Sönke Johannes,et al.  Human brain potentials to reading syntactic errors in sentences of different complexity , 1997, Neuroscience Letters.

[38]  G. Mulder,et al.  When syntax meets semantics. , 1997, Psychophysiology.

[39]  Thomas F. Mnte,et al.  Brain Activity Associated with Syntactic Incongruencies in Words and Pseudo-Words , 1997, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[40]  Susan M. Garnsey,et al.  The Contributions of Verb Bias and Plausibility to the Comprehension of Temporarily Ambiguous Sentences , 1997 .

[41]  E. Gibson.  Linguistic complexity: locality of syntactic dependencies , 1998, Cognition.

[42]  Aniruddh D. Patel,et al.  Processing Syntactic Relations in Language and Music: An Event-Related Potential Study , 1998, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[43]  Fernanda Ferreira,et al.  Reanalysis in sentence processing , 1998 .

[44]  Richard L. Lewis,et al.  Reanalysis and Limited Repair Parsing: Leaping off the Garden Path , 1998 .

[45]  A. R. Harris.  Electrophysiological indices of syntactic processing difficulty , 1998 .

[46]  M. Kutas,et al.  Expect the Unexpected: Event-related Brain Response to Morphosyntactic Violations , 1998 .

[47]  Kim Ainsworth-Darnell,et al.  Dissociating Brain Responses to Syntactic and Semantic Anomalies: Evidence from Event-Related Potentials , 1998 .

[48]  A. Friederici,et al.  Concerning the automaticity of syntactic processing. , 1999, Psychophysiology.

[49]  T F Münte,et al.  Brain Potentials in the Processing of Complex Sentences: An ERP Study of Control and Raising Constructions , 2000, Journal of psycholinguistic research.

[50]  Y. Miyashita,et al.  Image, language, brain , 2000 .

[51]  E. Gibson.  The dependency locality theory: A distance-based theory of linguistic complexity. , 2000 .