The effect of violating phrase structure rules and selectional restrictions on TEP patterns

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of violating phrase-structure rules and selectional restrictions on the TEP patterns in sentence learning tasks. It was found that violating selectional restrictions affected the between- and within-phrase pattern of responding. When phrase-structure rules were violated, the strings were found to be learned word by word. These findings were related to the problem of surface structure and deep structure analysis of sentence processing.