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Publication year
2003Source
Brain and Language, 85, 1, (2003), pp. 1-36ISSN
Publication type
Article / Letter to editor
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Organization
SW OZ DCC CO
Former Organization
SW OZ NICI CO
Journal title
Brain and Language
Volume
vol. 85
Issue
iss. 1
Page start
p. 1
Page end
p. 36
Subject
PsycholinguisticsAbstract
In order to test recent claims about the structure of verbal working memory, two ERP experiments with Dutch speaking participants were carried out. We compared the ERP effects of syntactic and semantic mid-sentence anomalies in subject and object relative sentences. In Experiment 1, the participants made acceptability judgments, while in Experiment 2 they read for comprehension. Syntactic anomalies concerned subject-verb disagreement, while semantic anomalies were related to implausible events (e.g., *The cat that fled from the mice ran through the room). Semantic anomalies did not elicit an N400 effect. The semantic as well as syntactic anomalies elicited P600 effects, with similar centro-parietal scalp distributions. For both kinds of anomaly, the P600 effects were modulated by syntactic complexity: they were either relatively small (Experiment 1) or absent (Experiment 2) in object relative sentences. Taken together, our results suggest that: (a) verbal working memory is a limited capacity system; (b) it is not subdivided into an interpretative and a post-interpretative component (Caplan Waters, 1999); (c) the P600 can reflect the presence of a semantic bias in syntactically unambiguous sentences; (d) the P600 is related to language monitoring: its function is to check upon the veridicality of an unexpected (linguistic) event; (e) if such a check is made, there is no integration of the event and hence no N400 effect. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science (USA). All rights reserved.
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- Faculty of Social Sciences [29483]
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