title: Temporal characteristics of online syntactic sentence planning: an event-related potential study.
abstract: During sentence production, linguistic information (semantics, syntax, phonology) of words is retrieved and assembled into a meaningful utterance. There is still debate on how we assemble single words into more complex syntactic structures such as noun phrases or sentences. In the present study, event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to investigate the time course of syntactic planning. Thirty-three volunteers described visually animated scenes using naming formats varying in syntactic complexity: from simple words ('W', e.g., "triangle", "red", "square", "green", "to fly towards"), to noun phrases ('NP', e.g., "the red triangle", "the green square", "to fly towards"), to a sentence ('S', e.g., "The red triangle flies towards the green square."). Behaviourally, we observed an increase in errors and corrections with increasing syntactic complexity, indicating a successful experimental manipulation. In the ERPs following scene onset, syntactic complexity variations were found in a P300-like component ('S'/'NP'>'W') and a fronto-central negativity (linear increase with syntactic complexity). In addition, the scene could display two actions - unpredictable for the participant, as the disambiguation occurred only later in the animation. Time-locked to the moment of visual disambiguation of the action and thus the verb, we observed another P300 component ('S'>'NP'/'W'). The data show for the first time evidence of sensitivity to syntactic planning within the P300 time window, time-locked to visual events critical of syntactic planning. We discuss the findings in the light of current syntactic planning views.
authors.affiliation: Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands ; Department of Paediatrics, Maastricht University Medical Centre, Maastricht, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Inge
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Timmers
authors.affiliation: Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands ; Institute of Research in Psychology, Institute of Neuroscience, Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium ; Maastricht Brain Imaging Center (M-BIC), Maastricht, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Francesco
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Gentile
authors.affiliation: Department of Paediatrics, Maastricht University Medical Centre, Maastricht, The Netherlands ; Laboratory of Genetic Metabolic Diseases, Maastricht University Medical Centre, Maastricht, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: M Estela
authors.initials: ME
authors.lastname: Rubio-Gozalbo
authors.affiliation: Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands ; Maastricht Brain Imaging Center (M-BIC), Maastricht, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Bernadette M
authors.initials: BM
authors.lastname: Jansma
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology; D004569:Electroencephalography; D018913:Event-Related Potentials, P300 / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D012660:Semantics; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D013997:Time Factors