title: Pre-attentive detection of syntactic and semantic errors.
abstract: This magnetoencephalographic study tested whether magnetic fields evoked by syntactic and semantic errors differ in their time course and magnitude from fields evoked by phonemic differences. An oddball design, using German sentences with embedded critical words was applied: The error condition (with the standard word RASEN, lawn, in 70% of the trials, and the syntactic and semantic errors ROSEN, roses and RIESEN, giant as deviants) was compared with a neutral, correct phonemic condition. Mismatch responses were significantly larger for syntactic and semantic errors as compared to mere phonemic deviations. The semantic error elicited higher mismatch responses than the syntactic error. This error-sensitive component is interpreted as a very early detector for semantic and syntactic errors.
authors.affiliation: Psycholinguistics and Cognitive Psychology Unit, Psychological Institute II, University of Münster, Germany. hans@menninet.de
authors.forename: Hans
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Menning
authors.forename: Pienie
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Zwitserlood
authors.forename: Sonja
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Schöning
authors.forename: Hermina
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Hihn
authors.forename: Jens
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Bölte
authors.forename: Christian
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Dobel
authors.forename: Klaus
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Mathiak
authors.forename: Bernd
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Lütkenhöner
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008280:Magnetics; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012660:Semantics; D013060:Speech / Q000502:physiology