The P600 as an indicator of syntactic ambiguity
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Updated: Sep 30, 2026

Dissociation of the Confounding Influences of Expectancy and Integrative Difficulty Residing in Anomalous Sentences in Event-related Potential Studies
Published on: May 9, 2019
Stefan Frisch1, Matthias Schlesewsky, Douglas Saddy
1Institute of Linguistics, University of Potsdam, P.O. Box 60 15 53, 14415 Potsdam, Germany. frisch@rz.uni-potsdam.de
Abstract:
In a study using event-related brain potentials, we show that the current characterization of the P600 component as an indicator of revision processes (reanalysis and repair) in sentence comprehension must be extended to include the recognition of syntactic ambiguity. By comparing the processing of ambiguous and unambiguous sentence constituents in German, we show that the P600 is elicited when our language processing system has syntactic alternatives at a certain item given in the input string. That the P600 is sensitive to syntactic ambiguity adds crucial evidence to current debates in psycholinguistic modelling, as the results clearly favour parallel models of syntactic processing which assume that ambiguity is recognized and costly.
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