TY - JOUR
T1 - Magnetoencephalography Reveals Mismatch Field Enhancement from Unexpected Syntactic Category Errors in English Sentences
AU - Kubota, Mikio
AU - Ono, Yumie
AU - Ishiyama, Atsushi
AU - Zouridakis, George
AU - Papanicolaou, Andrew C.
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported by the Grant-in-Aid for Exploratory Research, The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in Japan (No. 24652132) and the 2015–2016 Seijo University Special Research Grant, both awarded to MK.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 Elsevier B.V.
PY - 2018/1/1
Y1 - 2018/1/1
N2 - The type of syntactic operations that increase neuronal activation in humans as a result of syntactically erroneous, unexpected lexical items in hearing sentences has remained unclear. In the present study, we used recordings of magnetoencephalographic (MEG) activity to compare bare infinitive and full infinitive constructions in English. This research aims to identify the type of syntactic deviance that may trigger an early syntax-related mismatch field (MMF) component when unexpected words appear in sentences. Six speakers of English as a first language were presented with auditory stimuli of sentences or words in a passive odd-ball paradigm while watching a silent movie. The experimental protocol included four sessions, specifically investigating the sentential (structural) versions of full (with the ‘to’ infinitival particle) and bare infinitival structures (without the particle) and the lexical (non-structure) versions of the verb either with or without the particle to determine whether the structure processing of sentences was a more crucial factor in the detection of the MMF than the simple processing of lexical items in verb-only conditions. The amplitude analysis of the resulting evoked fields showed that the presence of the syntactic category error of bare infinitival structures against syntactic predictions evoked a significantly larger MMF activation with a peak latency of approximately 200 ms in the anterior superior temporal sulci in the left hemisphere, compared with the lexical items that did not have any syntactic status. These results clearly demonstrate that syntactically unexpected, illegal input in the bare infinitival structure is likely to be noticed more robustly in the brain while processing the structural information of the entire sentence than the corresponding verb-only items.
AB - The type of syntactic operations that increase neuronal activation in humans as a result of syntactically erroneous, unexpected lexical items in hearing sentences has remained unclear. In the present study, we used recordings of magnetoencephalographic (MEG) activity to compare bare infinitive and full infinitive constructions in English. This research aims to identify the type of syntactic deviance that may trigger an early syntax-related mismatch field (MMF) component when unexpected words appear in sentences. Six speakers of English as a first language were presented with auditory stimuli of sentences or words in a passive odd-ball paradigm while watching a silent movie. The experimental protocol included four sessions, specifically investigating the sentential (structural) versions of full (with the ‘to’ infinitival particle) and bare infinitival structures (without the particle) and the lexical (non-structure) versions of the verb either with or without the particle to determine whether the structure processing of sentences was a more crucial factor in the detection of the MMF than the simple processing of lexical items in verb-only conditions. The amplitude analysis of the resulting evoked fields showed that the presence of the syntactic category error of bare infinitival structures against syntactic predictions evoked a significantly larger MMF activation with a peak latency of approximately 200 ms in the anterior superior temporal sulci in the left hemisphere, compared with the lexical items that did not have any syntactic status. These results clearly demonstrate that syntactically unexpected, illegal input in the bare infinitival structure is likely to be noticed more robustly in the brain while processing the structural information of the entire sentence than the corresponding verb-only items.
KW - Daubechies 8 mother wavelet noise reduction
KW - Early syntactic component (ESC)
KW - Language
KW - Magnetoencephalography (MEG)
KW - Mismatch magnetic field (MMF)
KW - Odd-ball paradigm
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U2 - 10.1016/j.neulet.2017.07.051
DO - 10.1016/j.neulet.2017.07.051
M3 - Article
C2 - 28847487
AN - SCOPUS:85032971743
SN - 0304-3940
VL - 662
SP - 195
EP - 204
JO - Neuroscience Letters
JF - Neuroscience Letters
ER -