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Abstract:
Syntactic garden-paths have been shown to elicit
characteristic positive going components of the ERP (P600/SPS).
Recently, we could demonstrate that garden-paths arising from pure
case ambiguities (PCA) in German verb-final clauses (ambiguities
that do not rely on alternative phrase structural representations
but on alternative commitments for Case early in the sentence)
result in an enhanced N400-like negativity without eliciting a
P600/SPS. This result led to the conclusion that the specific ERP
response elicited by garden-paths is not uniform but mainly
determined by the nature of processes following the disambiguation
(incongruity detection, reanalysis). The present experiment further
investigates electrocortical activity (64 scalp electrodes) related
to processes after disambiguation. We compared ERPs triggered by
disambiguating verbs in garden-path sentences (sentences that allow
successful reanalysis) with ERPs to verbs that rendered sentences
containing the same incongruity as garden-path sentences
ungrammatical (no successful reanalysis). As our ERP data show,
garden-path sentences and ungrammatical sentences lead to an
indistinguishable negativity in an early time window (300-500 ms).
In the subsequent time window (500-700 ms) ERPs in ungrammatical
sentences but not in garden-path sentences remained more negative.
This may indicate that in both sentence types a search for
alternative syntactic representations is initiated and that this
search can be successfully terminated in garden-path sentences but
not in ungrammatical sentences.
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