Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings

in which any information is processed as soon as it becomes available. Hagoort’s model
is based on the parsing model developed by Vosse and Kempen (2000). Their ‘lexicalist
grammar’, as they call their model, simply means that the words in the mental lexicon are
represented together with the syntactic frame. This means that the nouns are represented
as heads of the NP phrases or prepositions as heads of PP phrases, as in Figure 3.
Figure 3. Representation of words in the mental lexicon
The unification process consists of lining up lexical frames with identical root and foot
nodes. The phrase the man with… will be formed simply by attaching the DP-det-the
entry (with the DP as the root node, (not on the Figure 3, but its structure is obvious)) to
the DP foot node under the main NP node. The same operation will be applied for the PP
with+NP. The PP root node will line up with the PP foot node under the main NP. If the
sentence is ambiguous, as the sentence (18):
(18) The woman sees the man with the binoculars.
there will be competition between the foot nodes that can attach the PP with the
binoculars. This competition (or ‘competitional inhibition’ in Vosse and Kempen, 2000)
will eventually determine whether it is the woman who has the binoculars or the man.
In MUC Hagoort identifies the brain areas that carry out linguistic computations. As the
language comprehension is a process that extends over time, the major requirement for
the brain circuits that deal with language information is the ability to maintain
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