title: The P600 as an indicator of syntactic ambiguity.
abstract: In a study using event-related brain potentials, we show that the current characterization of the P600 component as an indicator of revision processes (reanalysis and repair) in sentence comprehension must be extended to include the recognition of syntactic ambiguity. By comparing the processing of ambiguous and unambiguous sentence constituents in German, we show that the P600 is elicited when our language processing system has syntactic alternatives at a certain item given in the input string. That the P600 is sensitive to syntactic ambiguity adds crucial evidence to current debates in psycholinguistic modelling, as the results clearly favour parallel models of syntactic processing which assume that ambiguity is recognized and costly.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Linguistics, University of Potsdam, P.O. Box 60 15 53, 14415 Potsdam, Germany. frisch@rz.uni-potsdam.de
authors.forename: Stefan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Frisch
authors.forename: Matthias
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Schlesewsky
authors.forename: Douglas
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Saddy
authors.forename: Annegret
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Alpermann
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D011897:Random Allocation