PARSING OF SENTENCES IN A LANGUAGE WITH VARYING WORD-ORDER - WORD-BY-WORD VARIATIONS OF PROCESSING DEMANDS ARE REVEALED BY EVENT-RELATED BRAIN POTENTIALS
F. Rosler et al., PARSING OF SENTENCES IN A LANGUAGE WITH VARYING WORD-ORDER - WORD-BY-WORD VARIATIONS OF PROCESSING DEMANDS ARE REVEALED BY EVENT-RELATED BRAIN POTENTIALS, Journal of memory and language, 38(2), 1998, pp. 150-176
Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded while native speak
ers read German sentences in which the order of the sentence elements
subject, indirect object, and direct object was systematically varied.
All sentences were legal grammatical constructions. Sentences were pr
esented word by word and a question on the role assignments had to be
answered 5 s after the presentation of the final word or each sentence
. Behavioral data confirmed previous findings showing that sentences w
hose word order deviates from the canonical sequence of subject, indir
ect and direct object are more difficult to process. ERPs revealed sev
eral effects which differed in their antecedent conditions, topography
, and timing: (1) Anticipating a question which taxes episodic verbal
knowledge was accompanied by a pronounced tonic negative shift having
a left anterior maximum. (2) Article which function as case markers in
German evoked a transient, left anterior negativity whenever they ind
icated that a noun phase sequence would not continue in its canonical
order. (3) Nouns which follow case markers at noncanonical positions w
ere accompanied by an enlarged transient posterior positivity. (4) Pro
cessing of words at terminal positions in sentences with a noncanonica
l word order was accompanied by a sequence of effects: a slow posterio
r positivity, a transient anterior negativity, and a transient posteri
or negativity, respectively. These effects are discussed in relation t
o functionally distinct parsing mechanisms. They show that ERPs may he
lp to disentangle functionally distinct processes during language comp
rehension even when no behavioral output is generated by the participa
nt. (C) 1998 Academic Press.