Working memory constraints on syntactic processing: An electrophysiological investigation

Abstract

Event-related potentials (ERPs) and reaction times (RTs) were used to study how the processing of sentences with morphosyntactic violations is constrained by working memory (WM) capacity. The available WM capacity was varied by three orthogonal manipulations: (1) syntactic complexity; (2) additional WM load; and (3) verbal WM span. The processing of the morphosyntactic violations was reflected in longer RTs in ungrammatical compared with grammatical sentences, and in an anterior negativity and a centroparietal positivity in the ERPs. While the behavioral grammaticality effect was not influenced by the WM manipulations, the ERP effects were. The amplitude of the anterior negativity was modulated by the combination of complexity and load, and by WM span. The onset of the centroparietal positivity was delayed in the high-load condition, and for the low-span group. ERPs over the course of the sentences showed a frontal negative slow wave under high WM load, largest for the low-span group. The finding that online syntactic processing is related to WM span and to additional WM load does not support the theory that there is a WM capacity specific for syntactic processing.

Working memory capacity in L2 processing

“…Furthermore, across agreement conditions, not all participants showed the same ERP effect -that is, a late positivity for short-distance agreement violations often did not correspond to a late positivity for long-distance agreement violations. While these between-subject differences in L1 ERPs differ from the dependency-driven latency modulations of Phillips et al (2005), they are consistent with the finding that ERPs for grammatical errors often have individual differences that are masked by grand averages (e. g. Kutas and Hillyard 1983;King and Kutas 1995;Vos et al 2001).…”

“…An ERP study in Dutch by Vos et al (2001) found that manipulations of WM load and between-subject differences in verbal WM span (as assessed by a listeningspan task) modulated the amplitude of the LAN in response to subject-verb agreement violations, with higher-span participants showing a larger amplitude LAN than lower-span participants; the same WM factors did not modulate the amplitude of the P600 in response to the same violations, but they did modulate its latency. Behavioral measures in the same study were not sensitive to WM manipulations, a discrepancy that highlights the utility of ERPs in this type of investigation.…”

Spectral and temporal degradation of speech as a simulation of morphosyntactic deficits in English and German

“…They also fit with the general Ôsubject-firstÕ strategy that has been shown for such patients in English, German, Italian, and Dutch, as well as for normal subjects working under perceptual or attentional loads (Strube, 1996;Vos, Gunter, Kolk, & Mulder, 2001a;Vos, Gunter, Schriefers, & Friederici, 2001b). The specific result for German object clefts is especially interesting in light of a current controversy on the nature and causes of receptive agrammatism (Friederici & Gorrell, 1998;Grodzinsky, 2000).…”

An ERP study of syntactic processing in English and nonsense sentences

“…A lack of left-lateralization of anterior negativities, while rare, is not unprecedented. Bilateral (Hahne & Friederici, 2002;Münte & Heinze, 1994;Vos, Gunter, Kolk & Mulder, 2001) and right-lateralized (Osterhout & Nicol, 1999) anterior negativities for (morpho-) syntactic violations have been observed in other studies; however, no attempt has been made to systematically investigate experimental conditions which elicit bilateral and right-lateralized anterior negativities. The present study provides additional data that anterior negativities are not always left-lateralized; however, it is not possible to determine the factor that affects the distribution based on the present data.…”