Münte T F, Heinze H J, Matzke M, Wieringa B M, Johannes S
Department of Neurology, Medische Hochschule, Hannover, FRG.
Neuropsychologia. 1998 Mar;36(3):217-26. doi: 10.1016/s0028-3932(97)00119-x.
One of the current issues in the investigation of language by means of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) is whether there is an ERP effect that can be specifically related to the processing of syntactic information. It has been claimed that a late positivity (P600 or SPS-syntactic positive shift) occurring to syntactic violations or ambiguities qualifies as such an effect. In the present investigation we compared ERPs elicited by morphosyntactic (case inflection errors), semantic, and orthographic (misspelled words) violations in a group of young German subjects. All three types of violations gave rise to late positivities having the characteristics of the previously described P600/SPS. In an earlier time window, however, semantic violations were associated with a centroparietally distributed N400 component, whereas syntactic violations gave rise to a negativity of smaller amplitude that had a frontocentral distribution. In light of the present experiment, the view that the P600/SPS as a whole reflects specific syntactic processes appears to be untenable and an alternative interpretation is proposed. The different distributions of the late positive shifts merit further investigation.
目前通过事件相关脑电位（ERP）研究语言的问题之一是，是否存在一种能与句法信息处理明确相关的ERP效应。有人认为，出现在句法违反或歧义情况时的晚期正波（P600或句法正偏移，SPS）就属于这种效应。在本研究中，我们比较了一组年轻德国受试者在形态句法（格屈折错误）、语义和正字法（拼写错误）违反情况下引发的ERP。所有这三种类型的违反情况都引发了具有先前描述的P600/SPS特征的晚期正波。然而，在更早的时间窗口中，语义违反与中央顶叶分布的N400成分相关，而句法违反则引发了一个幅度较小、额中央分布的负波。根据本实验，认为P600/SPS整体反映特定句法过程的观点似乎站不住脚，本文提出了一种替代解释。晚期正偏移的不同分布值得进一步研究。
