title: Brain potentials elicited by garden-path sentences: evidence of the application of verb information during parsing.
abstract: Event-related potentials were recorded from 13 scalp locations while participants read sentences containing a syntactic ambiguity. In Experiment 1, syntactically disambiguating words that were inconsistent with the "favored" syntactic analysis elicited a positive-going brain potential (P600). Experiment 2 examined whether syntactic ambiguities are resolved by application of a phrase-structure-based minimal attachment principle or by word-specific subcategorization information. P600 amplitude was a function of subcategorization biases rather than syntactic complexity. These findings indicate that such biases exist and can influence the parser under certain conditions and that P600 amplitude is a function of the perceived syntactic well-formedness of the sentence.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Washington, Seattle 98195.
authors.forename: L
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Osterhout
authors.forename: P J
authors.initials: PJ
authors.lastname: Holcomb
authors.forename: D A
authors.initials: DA
authors.lastname: Swinney
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005071:Evoked Potentials; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007807:Language Tests; D008297:Male; D012660:Semantics; D014705:Verbal Behavior / Q000502:physiology*