The N400 as a correlate of interpretively relevant linguistic rules: Evidence from Hindi (original) (raw)
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Brain topography, 2002
Brain activities were compared between semantic and syntactic processing in the Japanese language using event-related potentials with a 58-ch EEG system. We previously found that semantic violations elicited N400 and syntactic violations elicited P600 but not early left anterior negativity (ELAN) or left anterior negativity (LAN) using a relatively long stimulus presentation time (1 s). In the present study, we adopted a shorter stimulus presentation time (0.5 s), which might impose a heavier burden on the working memory system, to test the possible relevance of load on the working memory system to ELAN/LAN. A global field power analysis showed an increased potential field strength at the latency of 320 ms in either type, as well as those at the later latencies reflecting N400 (556 ms) and P600 (712 ms). Statistical analyses revealed a significant negative deflection in the right frontal region for the semantic type, whereas no significant deflection in either specified region was o...
Event-Related Brain Potentials and Case Information in Syntactic Ambiguities
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 1998
In an ERP study, German sentences were investigated that contain a case-ambiguous NP that may be assigned accusative or dative case. Sentences were disambiguated by the verb in final position of the sentence. As our data show, sentences ending in a verb that assigns dative case to the ambiguous NP elicit a clear garden-path effect. The garden-path effect was indicated by a broad centro-posterior negative shift that occurred between 300 and 900 msec after the dative-assigning verb was presented. No enhanced P600 following the misanalysis was observed. Noun phrases whose case ambiguity was resolved in favor of accusative case and unambiguously dative-marked NPs did not trigger significant ERP differences. We will discuss the implications of our results for parsing and its neuropsychological correlates. The results of this study support a parser design according to which the so-called structural case (nominative or accusative) is assigned without any delay in the absence of morpho-lexi...
A. SPECIFIC AIMS The syntax of a human language is a set of abstract rules which constitute a computational system that defines the grammatical sentences of a language regardless of their semantic content; these sentences are intuitively well-formed to a native speaker (Chomsky, 1965; Batterink and Neville, 2013). Syntax is the study of linguistic form and grammatical structure, and semantics is the study of meaning and reference in language use (Chomsky, 1975). Electroencephalographic (EEG) studies suggest that syntactical processing may use implicit learning mechanisms and occur below the level of conscious awareness (Batterink and Neville, 2013). The biphasic event-related potential (ERP) associated with syntactical violations consists of an early negativity and a late positivity (Batterink and Neville, 2013). A cross-modal distraction task, during which an auditory tone is paired with a visually presented syntactical violation, revealed that only consciously detected syntactic violations elicit both phases of the ERP; undetected syntactical violations exhibited no late positivity (Batterink and Neville, 2013). On the semantic side, a recent study by Frankland and Greene (2015) claimed to identify subregions of the left mid-superior temporal cortex (lmSTC) that encode distinct abstract semantic variables (e.g., "Who did it?" and "To whom was it done?") using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We are interested in characterizing the relationship between subconscious syntactical processing and semantic processing. Theoretical linguists following Chomsky (1957, 1965, 1975) have argued for a distinction between syntax and semantics on the basis of sentences such as "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," which is grammatical but meaningless. Frankland and Greene (2015), however, suggest that meaning is structure-dependent on the basis of such sentences as "The baby was kicked by the grandfather" and "The grandfather was kicked by the baby;" they also cite downstream afferent processing differences associated with differences in semantic variable position. We propose that metaphor is an apt domain for cognitive neuroscience to parse the relation between syntactical and semantical processing. As a comparison of two semantically distinct domains, nominal metaphors involve the figurative use of a noun, as in "Time is a thief" (Cardillo et al., 2010). Nominal metaphors can be transformed between the active and passive voice, a procedure which conserves its syntactic deep structure (Chomsky, 1965). However, it is unclear whether metaphoric meaning is conserved in the active-passive transformation (e.g. "Time is a thief" vs. "A thief is time"). If sentence meaning is structure dependent, the question of where meaning is derived from (deep or surface structure) is of much interest to theoretical linguists and cognitive neuroscientists. Work in the Chatterjee lab, based on findings by Bowdle and Gentner (2005), has shown that the process by which certain words take on additional and directly-accessible figurative meanings involves a qualitative shift in cognitive processing from comparison to categorization: Novel metaphor comprehension initially involves right-hemisphere semantic processing, but as metaphors become familiar, comprehension seems to be increasingly mediated by the left hemisphere (Cardillo et al., 2012). Based on work by Batterink and Neville (2013), Batterink et al. (2010), Frankland and Greene (2015), and the Chatterjee lab, we hypothesize that the N400 response to unconsciously detected syntactic violations (Batterink and Neville, 2013) and consciously detected semantic violations (Batterink et al., 2010) results from a failure to map semantic knowledge onto unconsciously generated syntactic structures. Aim 1.1 Determine baseline ERP components of active-and passive-voice sentence structure. The goal of this study is to see if meaningful differences in ERP waveform exist between processing active-and passive-voice sentence structures. Protocol from Experiment 1 of Frankland and Greene, 2015 will be replicated, substituting EEG of the left hemisphere for fMRI. We will use a 64-channel ActiveTwo system for ERP recordings (Batterink and Neville, 2013). This study will set a baseline ERP waveform for comparison in additional studies. Aim 1.2 Determine ERP component changes of symmetric and asymmetric metaphor constituents vs. literal active-and passive-voice sentences. This study will explore how the position of semantic variables in grammatical and ungrammatical metaphors affects ERP waveform, and whether any changes in waveform index the locations of semantic or syntactic constituents. To parse the relation between syntactical structure and semantic constituent position, nominal symmetric metaphors ("The cat is a thief" ⇒ "The thief is a cat"), nominal asymmetric metaphors ("The lawyer is a shark" ⇒ "The shark is a lawyer"), and active-and passive-voice transformed literal sentences will be presented to subjects as EEG is recorded. Aim 2. Track effects of conventionalization of metaphor on semantic and syntactic expectancy. This study will attempt to index changes in ERP waveform to structure-mapping failures. Using protocol developed by Cardillo et al. (2012), participants will be taught nominal metaphors to three levels of conventionalization. Subjects will be presented with the metaphors during EEG recording, with either syntactic subject-verb agreement violations or semantic violations.
Neuropsychologia, 1998
One of the current issues in the investigation of language by means of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) is whether there is an ERP effect that can be specifically related to the processing of syntactic information. It has been claimed that a late positivity (P600 or SPS-syntactic positive shift) occurring to syntactic violations or ambiguities qualifies as such an effect. In the present investigation we compared ERPs elicited by morphosyntactic (case inflection errors), semantic, and orthographic (misspelled words) violations in a group of young German subjects. All three types of violations gave rise to late positivities having the characteristics of the previously described P600/SPS. In an earlier time window, however, semantic violations were associated with a centroparietally distributed N400 component, whereas syntactic violations gave rise to a negativity of smaller amplitude that had a frontocentral distribution. In light of the present experiment, the view that the P600/SPS as a whole reflects specific syntactic processes appears to be untenable and an alternative interpretation is proposed. The different distributions of the late positive shifts merit further investigation.
Psychophysiology, 2008
Recent brain potential research into first versus second language (L1 vs. L2) processing revealed striking responses to morphosyntactic features absent in the mother tongue. The aim of the present study was to establish whether the presence of comparable morphosyntactic features in L1 leads to more similar electrophysiological L1 and L2 profiles. ERPs were acquired while German-English bilinguals and native speakers of English read sentences. Some sentences were meaningful and well formed, whereas others contained morphosyntactic or semantic violations in the final word. In addition to the expected P600 component, morphosyntactic violations in L2 but not L1 led to an enhanced N400. This effect may suggest either that resolution of morphosyntactic anomalies in L2 relies on the lexico-semantic system or that the weaker/slower morphological mechanisms in L2 lead to greater sentence wrap-up difficulties known to result in N400 enhancement.
Psychophysiology, 2001
Language processing was investigated using event-related potentials (ERPs) obtained using a multichannel (58-ch) EEG system, with regard to semantic dependency (i.e., selectional restriction between a verb and the arguments it takes; the SR type) and syntactic dependency between sentence-final particles and interrogative phrases (the WH-Q type) in Japanese. It was found that semantic violations elicited the conventional N400, which was distributed in the bilateral occipital and the right temporal regions, and that the syntactic violations elicited the P600 in a broad area, predominantly in the centro-parietal regions. Scalp current density (SCD) mappings suggested that the right temporal cortex plays a significant role in integrating pieces of contextual information, especially when it is difficult to integrate a word in the context of a sentence, and that the P600 was connected to the syntactic processes conceivably indexed by the left temporal current sink with a relatively early onset.
Non-native syntactic processing of Case and Agreement: Evidence from event-related potentials
Second Language Acquisition of Turkish , 2016
The present study investigates the neural basis of syntactic processing in native and non-native speakers of Turkish, focusing on factors such as second language (L2) proficiency and language distance. Participants’ event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during a grammaticality judgment task consisting of subject case and subject-verb agreement violation sentences. The results indicate that while case violations (the divergent condition) reveal different ERP components in native and non-native speakers, agreement violations in finite clauses (the convergent condition) do not. Nevertheless, during the processing of agreement violations in non-finite clauses (the partial divergent condition) only high-intermediate L2 learners show native-like brain processing mechanisms. Findings suggest that L2 syntactic processing is affected by language distance as well as L2 proficiency.
Brain and Language, 2011
This paper demonstrates systematic cross-linguistic differences in the electrophysiological correlates of conflicts between form and meaning (''semantic reversal anomalies"). These engender P600 effects in English and Dutch (e.g. , but a biphasic N400 -late positivity pattern in German (Schlesewsky and Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, 2009), and monophasic N400 effects in Turkish (Experiment 1) and Mandarin Chinese (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 revealed that, in Icelandic, semantic reversal anomalies show the English pattern with verbs requiring a position-based identification of argument roles, but the German pattern with verbs requiring a case-based identification of argument roles. The overall pattern of results reveals two separate dimensions of cross-linguistic variation: (i) the presence vs. absence of an N400, which we attribute to cross-linguistic differences with regard to the sequence-dependence of the form-to-meaning mapping and (ii) the presence vs. absence of a late positivity, which we interpret as an instance of a categorisation-related late P300, and which is observable when the language under consideration allows for a binary well-formedness categorisation of reversal anomalies. We conclude that, rather than reflecting linguistic domains such as syntax and semantics, the late positivity vs. N400 distinction is better understood in terms of the strategies that serve to optimise the form-to-meaning mapping in a given language.
Conflicts in language processing: A new perspective on the N400–P600 distinction
Neuropsychologia, 2011
Conflicts in language processing often correlate with late positive event-related brain potentials (ERPs), particularly when they are induced by inconsistencies between different information types (e.g. syntactic and thematic/plausibility information). However, under certain circumstances, similar sentence-level interpretation conflicts (inanimate subjects) engender negativity effects (N400s) instead. The present ERP study was designed to shed light on this inconsistency. In previous studies showing monophasic positivities (P600s), the conflict was irresolvable and induced via a verb, whereas N400s were elicited by resolvable, argument-induced conflicts. Here, we therefore examined irresolvable argument-induced conflicts (pronoun case violations) in simple English sentences. Conflict strength was manipulated via the animacy of the first argument and the agreement status of the verb. Processing conflicts engendered a biphasic N400-late positivity pattern, with only the N400 sensitive to conflict strength (animacy). These results suggest that argument-induced conflicts engender N400 effects, (which we interpret in terms of increased competition for the Actor role) whereas irresolvable conflicts elicit late positivities (which we interpret as reflecting well-formedness categorisation).