There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Abstract
One of the current issues in the investigation of language by means of event-related
brain potentials (ERPs) is whether there is an ERP effect that can be specifically
related to the processing of syntactic information. It has been claimed that a late
positivity (P600 or SPS-syntactic positive shift) occurring to syntactic violations
or ambiguities qualifies as such an effect. In the present investigation we compared
ERPs elicited by morphosyntactic (case inflection errors), semantic, and orthographic
(misspelled words) violations in a group of young German subjects. All three types
of violations gave rise to late positivities having the characteristics of the previously
described P600/SPS. In an earlier time window, however, semantic violations were associated
with a centroparietally distributed N400 component, whereas syntactic violations gave
rise to a negativity of smaller amplitude that had a frontocentral distribution. In
light of the present experiment, the view that the P600/SPS as a whole reflects specific
syntactic processes appears to be untenable and an alternative interpretation is proposed.
The different distributions of the late positive shifts merit further investigation.