An event-related brain potential study of sentence comprehension in preschoolers: semantic and morphosyntactic processing.

The goal of this study was to investigate the distinctiveness and the relative time course of the event-related brain potentials (ERP) elicited by syntactically and semantically anomalous words within sentences in 36- and 48-month-old children. ERPs were recorded while children listened to semantically anomalous (i.e., My uncle will blow the movie*), syntactically anomalous (i.e., My uncle will watching the movie*) and control sentences (i.e., My uncle will watch the movie). Semantic violations elicited a negative slow wave with different peaks at 400, 600 and 800 ms in both age groups, whereas the morphosyntactic violations elicited two positive shifts: the first starting at 200 ms with a frontal distribution over the scalp and the second starting at 600 ms and peaking around 800 ms with a broad distribution across the scalp in 36-month-olds and anteriorly distributed for 48-month-olds. These results show that preschoolers display different ERP patterns to syntactic and to semantic violations within sentences. It is possible that the ERP effects here reported are analogous to those elicited in adults by the same type of stimuli, although differences in topography are evident.

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

[2]  H. Heinze,et al.  ERP Negativities During Syntactic Processing of Written Words , 1994 .

[3]  G Mulder,et al.  An electrophysiological study of semantic processing in young and middle-aged academics. , 1992, Psychophysiology.

[4]  E. Courchesne.  15 Cognitive Components of the Event-Related Brain Potential: Changes Associated with Development , 1983 .

[5]  A. Friederici.  Towards a neural basis of auditory sentence processing , 2002, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

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

[7]  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.

[8]  A D Friederici,et al.  Processing relative clauses varying on syntactic and semantic dimensions: An analysis with event-related potentials , 1995, Memory & cognition.

[9]  J. Polich,et al.  Cognitive and biological determinants of P300: an integrative review , 1995, Biological Psychology.

[10]  A. Friederici,et al.  Temporal structure of syntactic parsing: early and late event-related brain potential effects. , 1996, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[11]  J. Werker,et al.  Six-Month-Old Infants' Preference for Lexical Words , 2001, Psychological science.

[12]  H. Neville,et al.  Electrophysiological studies of language and language impairment. , 1997, Seminars in pediatric neurology.

[13]  Phillip J. Holcomb,et al.  Phonological Processing in Visual Rhyming: A Developmental ERP Study , 2001, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[14]  A. Friederici,et al.  Lexical integration: Sequential effects of syntactic and semantic information , 1999, Memory & cognition.

[15]  A. Friederici.  Children’s sensitivity to function words during sentence comprehension , 1983 .

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

[17]  Kara D. Federmeier,et al.  Electrophysiology reveals semantic memory use in language comprehension , 2000, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[18]  J. Werker,et al.  Newborn infants’ sensitivity to perceptual cues to lexical and grammatical words , 1999, Cognition.

[19]  E. Bates,et al.  2 ON THE INSEPARABILITY OF GRAMMAR AND THE LEXICON : EVIDENCE FROM ACQUISITION , APHASIA AND REAL-TIME PROCESSING , 1997 .

[20]  Dennis L. Molfese,et al.  Auditory evoked responses recorded from 16-month-old human infants to words they did and did not know , 1990, Brain and Language.

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

[22]  M. Kutas,et al.  Reading senseless sentences: brain potentials reflect semantic incongruity. , 1980, Science.

[23]  J. Nicol,et al.  On the Distinctiveness, Independence, and Time Course of the Brain Responses to Syntactic and Semantic Anomalies. , 1999 .

[24]  D. Molfese,et al.  Hemisphere and Stimulus Differences as Reflected in the Cortical Responses of Newborn Infants to Speech Stimuli. , 1979 .

[25]  D. Molfese.  Electrophysiological correlates of word meanings in 14-month-old human infants , 1989 .

[26]  Lee Osterhout,et al.  Event-related potentials and syntactic anomaly: Evidence of anomaly detection during the perception of continuous speech , 1993 .

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

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

[29]  G. Mulder,et al.  Focussing on aging: an electrophysiological exploration of spatial and attentional processing during reading , 1996, Biological Psychology.

[30]  Lee Osterhout,et al.  On the Brain Response to Syntactic Anomalies: Manipulations of Word Position and Word Class Reveal Individual Differences , 1997, Brain and Language.

[31]  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.

[32]  Marta Kutas,et al.  The impact of semantic memory organization and sentence context information on spoken language processing by younger and older adults: an ERP study. , 2002, Psychophysiology.

[33]  Helen J. Neville,et al.  Language comprehension and cerebral specialization from 13 to 20 months , 1997 .

[34]  H. Neville.  Developmental specificity in neurocognitive development in humans. , 1995 .

[35]  Colin M. Brown,et al.  The neurocognition of language , 2000 .

[36]  L. Fenson,et al.  Lexical development norms for young children , 1996 .

[37]  H. Neville,et al.  EPIGENESIS OF LANGUAGE , 1997 .

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

[39]  Noam Chomsky,et al.  Lectures on Government and Binding , 1981 .

[40]  Kathy Hirsh-Pasek,et al.  Reinterpreting Children's Sentence Comprehension: Toward a New Framework , 2019, The Handbook of Child Language.

[41]  E. Donchin,et al.  Is the P300 component a manifestation of context updating? , 1988, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[42]  M. Kutas,et al.  Event-related brain potentials during initial encoding and recognition memory of congruous and incongruous words , 1986 .

[43]  M. Taylor,et al.  Event-related potentials to visual and language stimuli in normal and dyslexic children. , 1990, Psychophysiology.

[44]  Jörg D. Jescheniak,et al.  What's left if the Jabberwock gets the semantics? An ERP investigation into semantic and syntactic processes during auditory comprehension , 2001 .

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

[46]  Douglas Saddy,et al.  Distinct Neurophysiological Patterns Reflecting Aspects of Syntactic Complexity and Syntactic Repair , 2002, Journal of psycholinguistic research.

[47]  A. Friederici,et al.  Temporal structure of syntactic parsing: early and late event-related brain potential effects. , 1996, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[48]  P. Huttenlocher,et al.  Basic neuroscience research has important implications for child development , 2003, Nature Neuroscience.

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

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

[51]  E. Bates.  Early language development and its neural correlates , 1992 .

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

[53]  Katrin Amunts,et al.  Broca's region: Cytoarchitectonic asymmetry and developmental changes , 2003, The Journal of comparative neurology.

[54]  H. Neville,et al.  Language Acquisition and Cerebral Specialization in 20-Month-Old Infants , 1993, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[55]  H. Neville,et al.  Visual and auditory sentence processing: A developmental analysis using event‐related brain potentials , 1992 .

[56]  E. Bizzi,et al.  The Cognitive Neurosciences , 1996 .

[57]  E Donchin,et al.  Syntactic parsing preferences and their on-line revisions: a spatio-temporal analysis of event-related brain potentials. , 2001, Brain research. Cognitive brain research.

[58]  Brian MacWhinney,et al.  The Handbook of Child Language , 1995 .

[59]  Peter Hagoort,et al.  The neurocognition of syntactic processing , 1999 .