Referential processing in the human brain: An Event-Related Potential (ERP) study

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Psycholinguistics
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Event-related potential (ERP) research often observes left anterior negativity (LAN) when processing syntactic long-distance dependencies.
• It remains debated whether LAN reflects syntactic processing specifically or a more general cognitive association mechanism.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if LAN effects are specific to syntactic dependencies or indicate a broader cognitive process of associating dependent linguistic elements.
• To test this by examining referential dependencies involving pronouns and proper names.

Main Methods:

• Compared ERP responses to pronouns with and without proper name antecedents.
• Compared ERP responses to proper names with and without preceding co-referring pronouns.
• Examined responses to verbs in object relative clauses versus coordinate clauses.

Main Results:

• Phasic LAN effects were observed for pronouns with antecedents, but not for pronouns without antecedents.
• No significant LAN differences were found between proper names with and without preceding co-referring pronouns.
• Similar, though not identical, ERP responses were observed for verbs following gaps in relative clauses compared to controls.

Conclusions:

• LAN effects at pronouns reflect the cognitive operations required to link them to their antecedents.
• Long-distance syntactic and referential dependencies present comparable processing challenges, eliciting similar LAN effects.
• These findings clarify the cognitive processes underlying anterior negative ERPs associated with dependent linguistic elements.