Abstract
One of the most intriguing findings on language comprehension is that
violations of syntactic predictions can affect event-related potentials
as early as 120 ms, in the same time-window as early sensory processing.
This effect, the so-called early left-anterior negativity (ELAN),
has been argued to reflect word category access and initial syntactic
structure building (Friederici, 2002). In two experiments, we used
magnetoencephalography to investigate whether (a) rapid word category
identification relies on overt category-marking closed-class morphemes
and (b) whether violations of word category predictions affect modality-specific
sensory responses. Participants read sentences containing violations
of word category predictions. Unexpected items varied in whether
or not their word category was marked by an overt function morpheme.
In Experiment 1, the amplitude of the visual evoked M100 component
was increased for unexpected items, but only when word category was
overtly marked by a function morpheme. Dipole modeling localized
the generator of this effect to the occipital cortex. Experiment
2 replicated the main results of Experiment 1 and eliminated two
non-morphology-related explanations of the M100 contrast we observed
between targets containing overt category-marking and targets that
lacked such morphology. Our results show that during reading, syntactically
relevant cues in the input can affect activity in occipital regions
at around 125 ms, a finding that may shed new light on the remarkable
rapidity of language processing.
- adult
- adult,data
- cortex,visual
- cortex:
- interpretation,
- lobe,occipital
- lobe:
- physiology,psycholinguistics,reading,visual
- physiology,young
- statistical,female,humans,language,magnetoencephalography,male,occipital
Users
Please
log in to take part in the discussion (add own reviews or comments).