Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings

esponse in high-frequency irregular verbs as in Allen et al, 2003; negative ‘slow wave’
between 550 and 1100 ms associated with mental image processing obtained in spatial
sentences as in Noordzij et al., 2006; animacy (semantic) effects that interfere with
sentence parsing and influence N400, P600 and LAN as in Weckerly and Kutas, 1999).
Dorsal and ventral streams as a framework for understanding the relation between brain
and language were proposed by Hickok and Poeppel (2004, 2007). They propose that the
ventral stream carries out the mapping from sound to meaning, while the dorsal stream
carries out mapping from sound to articulatory-based representations. However, no ERP
data was offered to corroborate this idea (it was based on fMRI studies).
The opponents of this interactive view either search for syntax related components as
early as 150 ms after the onset of the stimulus (‘early left anterior negativity’ or ELAN,
Friederici et al., 1993) or claim that the syntactic processes have higher degree of
automaticity (Gunter & Friederici, 1999).
Functional neuroimaging. In a narrow sense functional neuroimaging is restricted to
hemodynamic functional brain imaging, functional magnetic resonance (fMRI), positron
emition tomography (PET) and optical imaging in near infra-red spectrum (or optical
topography). These methods register changes in the local cerebral blood flow thus
providing indirect measure of brain activity. These methods do not have the millisecond
time resolution, but their spatial resolution is much higher than the resolution of EEG
(and there is no inverse problem). In addition, PET allows for the research into specific
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