Contextual information modulates initial processes of syntactic integration: the role of inter- versus intrasentential predictions.
The authors demonstrate that intersentential context may influence syntactic integration processes during online sentence comprehension, although this influence appears to be restricted to cases in which a contextual requirement must be fulfilled. By applying event-related brain potentials to the processing of clause-medial word order variations in German, the authors show that the local processing difficulty (a negativity from 300 to 450 ms) observed for object-initial sentences in a neutral context is also obtained in a (behaviorally) facilitating context in which the object is contextually given. By contrast, the processing pattern for a focused (questioned) initial object does not differ from that for a focused subject: both elicit a parietal positivity (280-480 ms) post-onset of the focused phrase. The authors interpret this early positivity as a general marker of focus integration, a process that appears to briefly supersede sentence-internal requirements.
D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000502:physiology; D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology*; D003265:Contingent Negative Variation / Q000502:physiology; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics