Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings

connectivist model in which probabilistic cues replace rule-based, hierarchical
organization of language.
Memory Unification Control Model (MUC). Peter Hagoort (2003, 2005) proposed a
neurolinguistic model that accounted for Friederici’s results, but provided explanation for
some other results that contradicted the syntax-first models. The crucial objection to the
Friederici’s model was the dependence of the ELAN on the order of the syntax-semantics
violations, i.e. on the availability of the syntactic or semantic information in the timeline
of the stimulus. In Friederici’s experiment in which acoustic stimuli were used syntactic
information is simply available before the semantic information as in examples (16) and
(17):
(16) Die Birne wurde im gepflückt. (The pear was being in-the plucked.)
(17) Die Freund wurde im besucht. (The friend was being in-the visited.)
In these examples im (i.e. a preposition and the article in dem) requires a noun while
prefixes ge- and be- require a verb, hence the word category violation and the ELAN. In
Hagoort’s Dutch examples this syntactic information is simply not available before the
semantic information because the information about the word category is contained in the
suffix, not in the preposition. The stimuli were acoustic, as well, and the target word
lasted about 450 ms. It was after 300 ms that the word category information was available
and this point was taken as a ‘category violation point’ or ‘CVP’. The ELAN component
was obtained at about 100 ms after the CVP, but N400 preceded it by approximately 10
ms because the semantic information was already available (Hagoort, 2003:23). This
constitutes strong evidence against syntax-first models and in favor of immediacy models
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