Event Related Potentials: Syntactic Violation and P600

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Event Related PotentialsSyntactic Violation
and P600

• Gordana Dobravac
• Laboratory for Psycholinguistic Research
• University of Zagreb
• Velimir Išgum
• Laboratory for Event Related Potentials Rebro
  Hospital, Zagreb

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ERP syntactic
violation and P600 - Dobravac, Išgum

LANGUAGE

• 2nd Croatian Congress of Neurophysiology,
  Dubrovnik, September 24, 2004

3
ERP syntactic
violation and P600 - Dobravac, Išgum

- understanding the cognitive and neural
mechanism of language very
difficult - methodological challenge BINDING
PROBLEM how we bind single-word information
into multiword utterances and complex
messages

• 2nd Croatian Congress of Neurophysiology,
  Dubrovnik, September 24, 2004

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ERP syntactic
violation and P600 - Dobravac, Išgum
TRIPARTITE ARCHITECTURE OF THE LANGUAGE FACULTY
1. Conceptual / semantic structures 2.
Phonological structures 3. Syntactic
structures
crucial in language processing
(Jackendoff, 2000)

• 2nd Croatian Congress of Neurophysiology,
  Dubrovnik, September 24, 2004

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ERP syntactic
violation and P600 - Dobravac, Išgum

ELECTROPHYSIOLOGICAL EVIDENCE ERP

• 2nd Croatian Congress of Neurophysiology,
  Dubrovnik, September 24, 2004

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ERP syntactic
violation and P600 - Dobravac, Išgum
LANGUAGE RELEVANT
ERP COMPONENTS 1. Conceptual / semantic
strucures N400 2. Phonological
structures N400 - like component
3. Syntactic structures ?

• 2nd Croatian Congress of Neurophysiology,
  Dubrovnik, September 24, 2004

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ERP syntactic
violation and P600 - Dobravac, Išgum
THE MICROVOLTS OF SYNTAX

• LAN Left Anterior Negativity
• Early LAN (ELAN)
• - 150 200 ms
• - phrase structure violations
• e.g. I like swim.
• Late LAN
• - 300 500 ms
• - morphosintactic agreement violations
• e.g. Children likes candies.

• P600 / SPS Syntactic Positive Shift
• 500 750 ms equal posterior distribution
• 750 1000 ms parietal maximum
• phrase structure violations
• morphosintactic agreement violations

• English, Dutch, German,
• French, Japanese, ISL

• 2nd Croatian Congress of Neurophysiology,
  Dubrovnik, September 24, 2004

8
ERP syntactic
violation and P600 - Dobravac, Išgum

• LAN? P600? WHAT COGNITIVE PROCESSES DO
  THEY REFLECT?
• incoming words generate predictions about the
  following syntactic categories
• e.g. Moja (my) sg fem ? noun sg fem
  kuca (house)
• or
  adj. sg fem velika (big)
• combining the current input with the predictions
  - syntactic integration
• e.g. Tvoja ? zelena ? haljina ? je
  ? lijep.
• sg, f ? sg, f ? sg, f
  ? sg ? sg, m ??

• detection

LAN

• reanalysis
• reactivation
• integration

P600 / SPS
(Hagoort et ai., 1999, Friederici et al., 1999,
Kaan et al., 2000)
0 600 1200
1800 ms

• 2nd Croatian Congress of Neurophysiology,
  Dubrovnik, September 24, 2004

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ERP syntactic
violation and P600 - Dobravac, Išgum

• 
  OUR STUDY
• pilot study
• AIM
• Is the processing of sentences with syntactic
  violation
• electrophysiologicaly different from the
  processing of sentences with
• normal syntactic structure?
• PARTICIPANTS
• 10 subjects
• females, right-handed, 24 30 years,
  monolingual Croatian speakers

• 2nd Croatian Congress of Neurophysiology,
  Dubrovnik, September 24, 2004

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ERP syntactic
violation and P600 - Dobravac, Išgum

• MATERIALS
• - 100 sentences ? 30 target 70 control
• - morphosintactic violation ? gender
  disagreement
• e.g. Medicinska sestra je ljubazan. (The
  nurse is kind.)
• sg f ? sg
  m
• PROCEDURE
• subjects seated in the shielded room, eyes
  closed
• auditory stimulus, 6000 ms interval
• RECORDING
• 20 electrodes
• reference electrodes on the mastoids

• 2nd Croatian Congress of Neurophysiology,
  Dubrovnik, September 24, 2004

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ERP syntactic
violation and P600 - Dobravac, Išgum
RESULTS
Control sentences
vs. Target sentences e.g.
Ova knjiga je korisna.
e.g. Ovo jezero je duboka.
(This book is useful.)
(This lake is deep.)

• 2nd Croatian Congress of Neurophysiology,
  Dubrovnik, September 24, 2004

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ERP syntactic
violation and P600 - Dobravac, Išgum
SEMANTIC VIOLATIONS VS.
SYNTACTIC VIOLATIONS
500 ms
500 ms
1000 ms
1000 ms
(Palmovic et al., 2004)

• 2nd Croatian Congress of Neurophysiology,
  Dubrovnik, September 24, 2004

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ERP syntactic
violation and P600 - Dobravac, Išgum

• CONCLUSIONS
• Different pattern of activation when processing
  sentences with normal
• syntactic structure and sentences with
  syntactic violations (gender
• disagreement)
• During processing sentences with syntactic
  violations there is a two-
• stage pattern
• 1. left anterior negativity
• 2. late increased positivity
• Different pattern of activation when processing
  sentences with syntactic
• violations and sentences with semantic
  violations

• 2nd Croatian Congress of Neurophysiology,
  Dubrovnik, September 24, 2004