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Dissociation of the Confounding Influences of Expectancy and Integrative Difficulty Residing in Anomalous Sentences in Event-related Potential Studies
Published on: May 9, 2019
The N400 as a correlate of interpretively relevant linguistic rules: evidence from Hindi
Kamal Kumar Choudhary1, Matthias Schlesewsky, Dietmar Roehm
1Independent Junior Research Group Neurotypology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany.
Abstract:
Classical views on the electrophysiology of language assume that different event-related potential (ERP) components index distinct linguistic subdomains. Hence, left-anterior negativities are often viewed as correlates of rule-based linguistic knowledge, whereas centro-parietal negativities (N400s) are taken to reflect (non-rule-based) semantic memory or aspects of lexical-semantic predictability. The present ERP study of case marking in Hindi challenges this clear-cut dichotomy. Though determined by a grammatical rule, the choice of subject case in Hindi is also interpretively relevant as it constrains the range of possible interpretations of the subject. For incorrect subject cases, we observed an N400, which was followed by a late positivity under certain circumstances. This finding suggests that violations of rule-based knowledge may engender an N400 when the rule is interpretively relevant.
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