형태-통사 및 의미 위반의 청각적 문장처리: 사건관련전위 기반 연구

Abstract

The present study examined auditory event-related potential (ERP) responses to sentence-embedded morpho-syntactic (inflectional honorific marker) and semantic (selectional restriction (SR)) violations. Morpho-syntactic violations in the present study were found to evoke a left anterior negativity peaking at around 400 ms. SR-related semantic anomalies elicited an N400 as well as a late posteriorly distributed N600. The shorter latency and different distribution of the negativity observed in response to morpho-syntactic violations compared to SR-related semantic anomalies indicate that the observed negativity is functionally different, suggesting that morpho-syntactic information is processed prior to lexical-semantic information. The finding of an N600 in response to SR semantic anomalies suggests that the latter component reflects processes of so-called reanalysis that are based on both semantic and syntactic aspects of the sentence. The study in this paper thus adds to the accumulating evidence for finer-grained differentiation of the brain responses, distinguishing morpho-syntactic from semantic-syntactic processes in sentence comprehension.