Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings

SUMMARY
The method of event-related potentials was used to gain insight in processes related to
sentence comprehension in Croatian. Two main designs were used: (1) within-group
design aimed at establishing dissociation between two aspects of syntactic processing, as
described in Role and Reference Grammar. It is claimed that two projections of a clause
in RRG, constituent and operator projection, are cognitively different. This claim was
tested in four ERP experiments (‘case’, ‘tense’, ‘gender’ and ‘quantifier’) with the aim of
establishing electrophysiological traces of these differences. (2) Between-group design
was used to obtain developmental data in a group of children with typical language
development and a group of children with Specific Language Impairment. For this
purpose two experiments, ‘case-chi’ and ‘tense-chi’ were conducted on all three groups
of participants, adults, children with TLD and children with SLI.
Different patterns of response were obtained in ‘case’ and ‘tense’ and ‘gender’ and
‘quantifier’ experiment. In ‘case’ and ‘gender’ experiments LAN and P600 components
were obtained. In ‘quantifier’ experiment N400 component was obtained. In ‘tense’
experiment strong late negative wave with maximum on left frontal electrodes was
recorded. It was labeled N400’ due to the semantic nature of the processes it was claimed
it represented and due to similar results for processing temporal information obtained in
Hungarian. Since grammatical (syntactic) violation was present in all experiments and
since two different patterns of ERP were obtained, dissociation between processing
constituency and operators is confirmed.
Developmental data on sentence comprehension in Croatian showed that language
development can be understood as growing specialization, i.e. modularization of
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