Brain potentials elicited by garden-path sentences: Evidence of the application of verb information during parsing.
- 1 January 1994
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Psychological Association (APA) in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition
- Vol. 20 (4) , 786-803
- https://doi.org/10.1037//0278-7393.20.4.786
Abstract
Event-related potentials were recorded from 13 scalp locations while participants read sentences containing a syntactic ambiguity. In Experiment 1, syntactically disambiguating words that were inconsistent with the "favored" syntactic analysis elicited a positive-going brain potential (P600). Experiment 2 examined whether syntactic ambiguities are resolved by application of a phrase-structure-based minimal attachment principle or by word-specific subcategorization information. P600 amplitude was a function of subcategorization biases rather than syntactic complexity. These findings indicate that such biases exist and can influence the parser under certain conditions and that P600 amplitude is a function of the perceived syntactic well-formedness of the sentence.Keywords
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