Brain responses to agreement violations of Chinese grammatical aspect

Grammatical aspect captures ways in which a language uses grammatical markers to describe the temporal structure of an event. An event-related potential experiment was conducted to investigate event-related potential correlates of agreement violations of Chinese grammatical aspect. Participants read...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inNeuroreport Vol. 19; no. 10; p. 1039
Main Authors Zhang, Yaxu, Zhang, Jingting
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published England 02.07.2008
Subjects
Adult
Analysis of Variance
Asian Continental Ancestry Group
Brain - physiology
Brain Mapping
Electroencephalography - methods
Evoked Potentials - physiology
Female
Humans
Male
Mental Processes - physiology
Reaction Time - physiology
Semantics
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Summary:Grammatical aspect captures ways in which a language uses grammatical markers to describe the temporal structure of an event. An event-related potential experiment was conducted to investigate event-related potential correlates of agreement violations of Chinese grammatical aspect. Participants read sentences containing either aspect agreement violations, semantic violations, or no violations. Semantic violations elicited an N400, whereas aspectual violations elicited a 200-400 ms posterior and left central negativity, followed by a P600, instead of left anterior negativity or N400, suggesting that left anterior negativities may not reflect a general, rule-governed, syntactically compositional process, and that grammatical aspect processing is at least not completely semantically driven. The negativity mostly reflects a failure to bind aspect markers or the detection of aspectual errors.
ISSN:0959-4965
1473-558X
DOI:10.1097/WNR.0b013e328302f14f