CNTNAP2 and Language Processing in Healthy Individuals as Measured with ERPs

• Published in: PloS one Vol. 7; no. 10; p. e46995
• Main Authors: Kos, Miriam, van den Brink, Danielle, Snijders, Tineke M., Rijpkema, Mark, Franke, Barbara, Fernandez, Guillen, Hagoort, Peter
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Public Library of Science 24.10.2012; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: Adolescent; Adult; Adults; Autism; Biology; Brain; Carriers; Cell adhesion & migration; Child & adolescent psychiatry; Cognition & reasoning; Electroencephalography; Event-related potentials; Evoked Potentials; Foxp2 protein; Homozygotes; Humans; Information processing; Language; Linguistics; Medicine; Membrane Proteins - genetics; Membrane Proteins - physiology; Mutation; Natural language processing; Nerve Tissue Proteins - genetics; Nerve Tissue Proteins - physiology; Neurosciences; NMR; Nuclear magnetic resonance; Proteins; Reading comprehension; Reference Values; Semantics; Skills; Social and Behavioral Sciences; Studies; Young Adult; Netherlands
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0046995

The genetic FOXP2-CNTNAP2 pathway has been shown to be involved in the language capacity. We investigated whether a common variant of CNTNAP2 (rs7794745) is relevant for syntactic and semantic processing in the general population by using a visual sentence processing paradigm while recording ERPs in 49 healthy adults. While both AA homozygotes and T-carriers showed a standard N400 effect to semantic anomalies, the response to subject-verb agreement violations differed across genotype groups. T-carriers displayed an anterior negativity preceding the P600 effect, whereas for the AA group only a P600 effect was observed. These results provide another piece of evidence that the neuronal architecture of the human faculty of language is shaped differently by effects that are genetically determined.