Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings

scalp distribution define the physiological characteristics, latency or sensitivity to certain
stimuli define the psychological function that is manipulated in the experiment.
For some researchers in language comprehension ERP is close to the ideal research
method (Osterhout et al., 1997). The ideal method should
…provide continuous measurements during the process of interest, be
differentially sensitive to events occurring at distinct levels of analysis and not
rely on conscious judgments (ibid., p. 203).
With the temporal resolution of about 1 ms ERP provides real-time measure of brain
activity. It records the summed activity of simultaneously occurring postsynaptic activity
giving thus the direct information about the neuronal populations activated in the
experiment. As noted above, it is a multidimensional measure; therefore, it is more likely
to be sensitive to different aspects of the processes related to sentence comprehension.
ERP proved to be particularly successful in sentence comprehension studies where the
approach included the presentation of a linguistic anomaly. The first study that took this
approach was the famous study by Kutas and Hillyard (1980) in which N400 was
obtained in sentences in which the last word was semantically anomalous, i.e. did not fit
into the sentence context. When syntactically anomalous sentences were presented, a
different waveform was obtained, the P600 component or Syntactic Positive Shift (SPS)
(Hagoort, et al., 1993, Osterhout & Holcomb, 1992, Hagoort et al. 2003). Some syntactic
anomalies elicit different electrophysiological response: left anterior negativity
(Friederici, 1995). Friederici (2002) also claim that word-category violation elicit even
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