Sentence verification and event-related brain potentials.
The purpose of this study was to examine whether the decision process affected scalp recorded event-related brain potentials (ERPs). ERPs were recorded while 10 subjects evaluated the veracity of four types of Japanese sentences; true-affirmative (TA), true-negative (TN), false-affirmative (FA), and false-negative (FN). Each sentence was presented visually, one word at a time in the following order: Subject (S); object (O); and verb (V). This order of words, which is normal in Japanese grammar, allowed the ERP waveforms associated with semantic mismatch between the S and O occurring in the middle of the sentence to be separated from those elicited by the decision concerning the sentence's truth or falsity occurring at the end of the sentence. Semantic mismatch was associated with a negative component (N310) following the O-word. In addition, P3s were elicited by sentence final words. Affirmative sentences elicited larger P3s than did negative sentences, and true sentences elicited earlier P3s than did false sentences. P3s were smaller in amplitude when they followed a mismatch between the S and O words. The result suggested that by using Japanese sentences, it may be possible to examine sentence-level rather than word-level processes.
D000328:Adult; D003657:Decision Making / Q000502:physiology*; D005071:Evoked Potentials; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007564:Japan; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D011930:Reaction Time; D012660:Semantics; D014342:Truth Disclosure