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Towards Understanding Sustained Neural Activity Across Syntactic Dependencies.

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Sustained anterior negativities (SANs) during sentence comprehension do not reflect syntactic prediction or traditional working memory. Instead, SANs may index non-linguistic working memory encoding at the discourse level.

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ERPSANlanguage processingsustained neural activitysyntactic dependenciessyntactic predictionsworking memory

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Area of Science:

  • Neuroscience
  • Psycholinguistics
  • Cognitive Science

Background:

  • Sustained anterior negativities (SANs) are linked to the language-memory interface in neurolinguistics.
  • Traditionally, SANs are interpreted as neural indices of working memory for sentence processing, particularly for long-distance dependencies.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate whether SANs reflect syntactic prediction or working memory.
  • To differentiate between sentence-level and discourse-level working memory contributions to SANs.

Main Methods:

  • Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during three experiments.
  • SANs were evaluated in object wh-questions and sentences with contrasting adverbial types (subordinating vs. temporal).

Main Results:

  • No SANs were observed for subordinating adverbials, contradicting the syntactic prediction hypothesis.
  • SANs were present in matrix questions but absent in embedded questions, challenging traditional working memory accounts.
  • Results suggest SANs are not solely tied to syntactic working memory.

Conclusions:

  • The findings challenge the interpretation of SANs as purely syntactic working memory or syntactic prediction indices.
  • A revised hypothesis proposes that SANs reflect working memory encoding at the non-linguistic discourse representation level.
  • This suggests a broader role for sustained neural activity in supporting working memory beyond sentence structure.