Event-related brain potentials during natural speech processing: effects of semantic, morphological and syntactic violations

Abstract

The present study investigated different aspects of auditory language comprehension. The sentences which were presented as connected speech were either correct or incorrect including a semantic error (selectional restriction), a morphological error (verb inflection), or a syntactic error (phrase structure). After each sentence, a probe word was presented auditorily, and subjects had to decide whether this word was part of the preceding sentence or not. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 7 scalp electrodes. The ERPs evoked by incorrect sentences differed significantly from the correct ones as a function of error type. Semantic anomalies evoked a 'classical' N400 pattern. Morphological errors elicited a pronounced negativity between 300 and 600 ms followed by a late positivity. Syntactic errors, in contrast, evoked an early negativity peaking around 180 ms followed by a negativity around 400 ms. The early negativity was only significant over the left anterior electrode. The present data demonstrate that linguistic errors of different categories evoke different ERP patterns. They indicate that with using connected speech as input, different aspects of language comprehension processes cannot only be described with respect to their temporal structure, but eventually also with respect to possible brain systems subserving these processes.

Event-related brain potentials during the monitoring of speech errors

“…Thus, it is feasible that such faster processing is reflected in the early onset of the PMNs. In addition, effects of lexical access (Marslen-Wilson and Tyler, 1975;Marslen-Wilson and Welsh, 1978) and syntactic processing (Friederici et al, 1993;Neville, Nicol, Barss, Forster, and Garrett, 1991) in language comprehension have been observed to begin within 100-200 ms. Considering that phonological effects should occur prior to lexical access and syntactic processing, the early effects of phonological mismatch reported here become conceivable.…”

“…lexical access and semantic integration of words into context (Kutas, and Federmeier, 2000;Kutas and Van Petten, 1994;Van Petten and Luka, 2006 for reviews; see also Holcomb, 1993). In contrast, syntactic anomalies were found to elicit a positive deflection peaking around 600 ms following the anomalous word onset, the P600 (Hagoort, Brown, and Groothusen, 1993; see also Friederici, Pfeifer, and Hahne, 1993). Note that recent studies also found P600 effects in response to semantically implausible sentences (Kolk, Chwilla, Van Herten, and Oor, 2003;Kuperberg, 2007).…”

Processing semantic anomalies in two languages: an electrophysiological exploration in both languages of Spanish–English bilinguals

“…This topographical difference in the ERPs elicited by final words in the two languages of a bilingual superficially resembles a left anterior negativity (LAN) effect. LAN effects have been associated to syntactic processes, such as phrase structure violations within sentences [11,34,35], or more generally with working memory processes [18,20,45]. If this effect is a LAN, then it might reflect greater working memory demands when bilinguals process their nondominant language versus their dominant language.…”

Bach Speaks: A Cortical “Language-Network” Serves the Processing of Music

“…While relatively early (around 180 -350 ms) electrical brain responses to unexpected items in a structured sequence were often lateralized to the left when processing language (Friederici et al, 1993;Hahne and Friederici, 1999), they were often lateralized to the right when processing music (Patel et al, 1998;Koelsch et al, 2000a). The early brain responses (maximal around 200 -350 ms) elicited by violations of musical regualrities were taken to reflect the processing of music-syntactic information (Patel et al, 1998;Koelsch et al, 2000a).…”