Mismatch negativity: a tool for studying morphosyntactic processing?
OBJECTIVE
Mismatch negativity (MMN) was originally shown in a passive auditory oddball paradigm to be generated by any acoustical change. More recently, it has been applied to the study of higher order linguistic levels including the morphosyntactic level in spoken language comprehension. In this study, we present two MMN experiments to determine whether morphosyntactic features are involved in the representations underlying the morphosyntactic processing.


METHODS
We reported two MMN experiments in passive auditory oddball paradigm with pairs of French words, a pronoun and a verb, differing in agreement grammaticality. These two experiments differed in the number of morphosyntactic features producing agreement violations, i.e. either of person and number features or of person feature.


RESULTS
We observed no effect of grammaticality on the MMN response for these two experiments.


CONCLUSIONS
Our studies highlight the difficulties encountered in studying morphosyntactic level with the passive auditory oddball paradigm.


CONCLUSIONS
The reasons for our inability to replicate previous studies are presented, and methodological changes in the passive auditory oddball paradigm are proposed to better tap into the morphosyntactic level.
Brunellière
Angèle
A
Laboratoire Parole et Langage, CNRS UMR6057 - University of Aix-Marseille, Aix-en-Provence, France. angele.brunelliere@lpl-aix.fr
Frauenfelder
Ulrich H
UH
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology*; D003265:Contingent Negative Variation / Q000502:physiology*; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005072:Evoked Potentials, Auditory / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D013997:Time Factors; D014825:Vocabulary; D055815:Young Adult