Differences in the perception and time course of syntactic and semantic violations

A reading time and an ERP experiment conducted in Italian investigated the parser’s responses to a syntactic violation (subject-verb number agreement) and to a semantic violation (subject-verb selectional restriction), examining the time course of comprehension processes until sentence end. The read...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Brain and language 2003-05, Vol.85 (2), p.280-296
Main Authors: Vincenzi, Marica De, Job, Remo, Di Matteo, Rosalia, Angrilli, Alessandro, Penolazzi, Barbara, Ciccarelli, Laura, Vespignani, Francesco
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Adult
Behavioral psychophysiology
Biological and medical sciences
Electrophysiology
ERPs
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Humans
Linguistics
Male
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Reaction Time
Reading
Reading times
Semantics
Sentence processing
Speech Perception
Syntax
Violations
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Summary:A reading time and an ERP experiment conducted in Italian investigated the parser’s responses to a syntactic violation (subject-verb number agreement) and to a semantic violation (subject-verb selectional restriction), examining the time course of comprehension processes until sentence end. The reading-time data showed that the syntactic violation was detected earlier than the semantic one and that the two violations differed in the time-course. The ERP data fully supported the reading time data: Syntactic anomalies elicited a left anterior negativity (LAN) and a P600. Semantic anomalies elicited a N400 centred on the parietal sites which started 90 ms later (latency 430 ms) than the LAN. Furthermore, the N400 evoked by the words that followed the target word continued and increased until sentence end. The results are discussed with respect to the hypotheses that the parser constructs distinct syntactic and semantic analyses of a sentence and that this characteristic holds cross-linguistically. The appropriateness of different methodologies to the study of sentence processing is also evaluated.
ISSN:0093-934X
1090-2155
DOI:10.1016/S0093-934X(03)00055-5