Syntactic processing of Hebrew sentences: ERP measures

The present study was designed to investigate whether the syntactic functio ns of words systematically influence the amplitudes and latencies of event- related potential (ERP) components in the reading of Hebrew sentences. Part icipants were 15 male native Hebrew-speaking college students aged 18-27 ye ars. The processing of normal word strings in terms of words' lexical-morph ological and syntactic characteristics was examined during word-by-word rea dings of sentences having subject-verb-object (SVO) syntactic structure. Da ta revealed that N100 and P300 ERP components were sensitive to internal pr ocesses of syntactic parsing during sentence-reading comprehension, particu larly to some components of identification and analysis of the words in acc ordance with their grammatical roles. Identification of words with definite syntactic functions seemed to be done by means of the words' lexical-morph ological characteristics.