Schacht Annekathrin, Sommer Werner, Shmuilovich Olga, Martíenz Pilar Casado, Martín-Loeches Manuel
CRC Text Structures, University of Goettingen, Goettingen, Gemany.
Department of Psychology, Humboldt-University at Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
PLoS One. 2014 Mar 10;9(3):e91226. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0091226. eCollection 2014.
Syntactic violations in sentences elicit a P600 component in the event-related potential, which is frequently interpreted as signaling reanalysis or repair of the sentence structure. However, P600 components have been reported also for semantic and combined semantic and syntactic violations, giving rise to still other interpretations. In many of these studies, the violation might be of special significance for the task of the participants; however there is a lack of studies directly targeting task effects on the P600. Here we repeated a previously published study but using a probe verification task, focusing on individual words rather than on sentence correctness and directly compared the results with the previous ones. Although a (somewhat smaller) N400 component occurred also in the present study, we did not observe a parietal P600 component. Instead, we found a late anterior negativity. Possibly, the parietal P600 observed in sentence acceptability paradigms relates to the target value of the violations or to late sentence structure-specific processes that are more task-sensitive than the N400 and which are or not initiated in the probe verification task. In any case the present findings show a strong dependency of P600-eliciting processes from attention to the sentences context whereas the N400 eliciting processes appear relatively robust.
句子中的句法违反会在事件相关电位中引发P600成分，该成分常被解释为标志着对句子结构的重新分析或修复。然而，对于语义违反以及语义和句法混合违反也有P600成分的报道，这引发了其他一些解释。在许多此类研究中，这种违反可能对参与者的任务具有特殊意义；然而，缺乏直接针对任务对P600影响的研究。在这里，我们重复了一项先前发表的研究，但使用了探测验证任务，关注单个单词而非句子的正确性，并将结果与之前的结果直接进行比较。尽管在本研究中也出现了一个（稍小的）N400成分，但我们没有观察到顶叶P600成分。相反，我们发现了一个晚期前部负波。可能在句子可接受性范式中观察到的顶叶P600与违反的目标值或与比N400对任务更敏感且在探测验证任务中是否启动的晚期句子结构特定过程有关。无论如何，目前的研究结果表明引发P600的过程强烈依赖于对句子上下文的关注，而引发N400的过程似乎相对稳健。
