Are the anterior negativities to grammatical violations indexing working memory?

Anterior negativities obtained when a grammatical rule is violated may reflect highly automatic first‐pass parsing processes, the detection of a morphosyntactic mismatch, and/or the inability to assign the incoming word to the current phrase structure. However, for some theorists these negativities...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Psychophysiology 2005-09, Vol.42 (5), p.508-519
Main Authors: Martín-Loeches, Manuel, Muñoz, Francisco, Casado, Pilar, Melcón, A., Fernández-Frías, C.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Adult
Attention - physiology
Biological and medical sciences
Brain Mapping
Cerebral Cortex - physiology
Comprehension - physiology
Contingent Negative Variation - physiology
Electroencephalography
Evoked Potentials
Female
Frontal Lobe - physiology
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Grammar
Human
Humans
LAN
Language
Learning. Memory
Male
Memory
Memory, Short-Term
Miscellaneous
P600
Physiological psychology
Problem Solving
Psycholinguistics
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Reading
Semantics
Syntax
Working memory
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Summary:Anterior negativities obtained when a grammatical rule is violated may reflect highly automatic first‐pass parsing processes, the detection of a morphosyntactic mismatch, and/or the inability to assign the incoming word to the current phrase structure. However, for some theorists these negativities rather reflect some aspect of working memory processes. Event‐related brain potentials (ERPs) obtained for word category and morphosyntactic violations were directly compared with effects obtained when working memory is particularly demanded (embedding subject‐ or object‐relative clauses), yielding a significant dissociation in terms of topography. Even though, the anterior negativities for grammatical violations vanished when relative clauses were embedded, suggesting that the processes reflected by anterior negativities related to grammatical violations and those related to working memory manipulations, even if different, are placing demands on a common pool of limited resources.
ISSN:0048-5772
1469-8986
1540-5958
DOI:10.1111/j.1469-8986.2005.00308.x