Hestvik Arild, Maxfield Nathan, Schwartz Richard G, Shafer Valerie
Ph.D. Program in Speech and Hearing Sciences, The Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, City University of New York, NY 10016, USA.
Brain Lang. 2007 Mar;100(3):301-16. doi: 10.1016/j.bandl.2006.07.007. Epub 2006 Sep 12.
An unresolved issue in the study of sentence comprehension is whether the process of gap-filling is mediated by the construction of empty categories (traces), or whether the parser relates fillers directly to the associated verb's argument structure. We conducted an event-related potentials (ERP) study that used the violation paradigm to examine the time course and spatial distribution of brain responses to ungrammatically filled gaps. The results indicate that the earliest brain response to the violation is an early left anterior negativity (eLAN). This ERP indexes an early phase of pure syntactic structure building, temporally preceding ERPs that reflect semantic integration and argument structure satisfaction. The finding is interpreted as evidence that gap-filling is mediated by structurally predicted empty categories, rather than directly by argument structure operations.
句子理解研究中一个尚未解决的问题是，填补空缺的过程是由空范畴（语迹）的构建介导的，还是句法分析器将填充语直接与相关动词的论元结构联系起来。我们进行了一项事件相关电位（ERP）研究，采用违背范式来检验大脑对语法错误填补空缺的反应的时间进程和空间分布。结果表明，对违背情况最早的大脑反应是早期左前负波（eLAN）。这个ERP指标反映了纯句法结构构建的早期阶段，在反映语义整合和论元结构满足的ERP之前出现。这一发现被解释为证据，表明填补空缺是由结构上预测的空范畴介导的，而不是直接由论元结构操作介导的。
