The P600 as an indicator of syntactic ambiguity

The P600 as an indicator of syntactic ambiguity

In a study using event-related brain potentials, we show that the current characterization of the P600 component as an indicator of revision processes (reanalysis and repair) in sentence comprehension must be extended to include the recognition of syntactic ambiguity. By comparing the processing of...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Cognition Vol. 85; no. 3; pp. B83 - B92
Main Authors: Frisch, Stefan, Schlesewsky, Matthias, Saddy, Douglas, Alpermann, Annegret
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Amsterdam Elsevier B.V 01-10-2002
Elsevier Science
Subjects:
Adult
Behavioral psychophysiology
Biological and medical sciences
Brain - physiology
Cognition
Electrophysiology
Event-related brain potentials
Evoked Potentials - physiology
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Humans
Language
Language processing
Learning
Linguistics
Male
P600 component
Parallel processing
Production and perception of written language
Psychology
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Random Allocation
Serial processing
Syntactic ambiguity
Parallel processing
Event-related brain potentials
Language processing
P600 component
Serial processing
Syntactic ambiguity
Human
Verbal comprehension
Central nervous system
Electrophysiology
German
Cognition
Reading
Language
Syntax
Event evoked potential
Ambiguity
Brain (vertebrata)
Online Access:Get full text
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Description
Summary:In a study using event-related brain potentials, we show that the current characterization of the P600 component as an indicator of revision processes (reanalysis and repair) in sentence comprehension must be extended to include the recognition of syntactic ambiguity. By comparing the processing of ambiguous and unambiguous sentence constituents in German, we show that the P600 is elicited when our language processing system has syntactic alternatives at a certain item given in the input string. That the P600 is sensitive to syntactic ambiguity adds crucial evidence to current debates in psycholinguistic modelling, as the results clearly favour parallel models of syntactic processing which assume that ambiguity is recognized and costly.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-2
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ISSN:0010-0277
1873-7838
DOI:10.1016/S0010-0277(02)00126-9