Brain responses to agreement violations of Chinese... : NeuroReport (original) (raw)
COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE AND NEUROPSYCHOLOGY
Brain responses to agreement violations of Chinese grammatical aspect
aDepartment of Psychology, Peking University
bKey Laboratory of Machine Perception (Peking University), Ministry of Education, Beijing, China
Correspondence to Dr Yaxu Zhang, Department of Psychology, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
Tel: +86 10 6275 9770; fax: +86 10 6276 1081; e-mail: [email protected]
Received 25 March 2008; accepted 1 April 2008
Abstract
Grammatical aspect captures ways in which a language uses grammatical markers to describe the temporal structure of an event. An event-related potential experiment was conducted to investigate event-related potential correlates of agreement violations of Chinese grammatical aspect. Participants read sentences containing either aspect agreement violations, semantic violations, or no violations. Semantic violations elicited an N400, whereas aspectual violations elicited a 200–400 ms posterior and left central negativity, followed by a P600, instead of left anterior negativity or N400, suggesting that left anterior negativities may not reflect a general, rule-governed, syntactically compositional process, and that grammatical aspect processing is at least not completely semantically driven. The negativity mostly reflects a failure to bind aspect markers or the detection of aspectual errors.
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