Syntactic Constructions Drive Cortical Tracking in the Absence of Lexical Content: An Electrophysiological Investigation of Sentence Processing During Reading

Abstract

It has been suggested that the synchronization of neural oscillations to syntactic units, such as phrases or clauses, is dependent on lexically-derived projections of syntactic structure. This assertion is based from recent evidence that participants are unable to effectively track syntax when listening to jabberwocky sentences, in which content words are replaced with pseudowords thereby eliminating lexically-derived syntactic projections (Kaufeld et al., 2020; Coopmans et al., 2022). In the present study, we present evidence that participants can in fact track syntactic units in jabberwocky sentences when the stimuli are presented visually and in a syntactic pattern with high cue validity - methodological differences that make it easier for participants to identify syntactic patterns. We interpret this finding as indicating that the primary driving force of cortical tracking is pattern recognition and temporal predication of said pattern and that this pattern need not derive from lexical projections.