The P600 as an indicator of syntactic ambiguity

• 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)
• ISSN: 0010-0277; 1873-7838
• DOI: 10.1016/S0010-0277(02)00126-9

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.