| |
Abstract:
Abstract: The aim of this study is to investigate the effect
of the offset response possibly contaminated in the event-related
potential (ERP) components elicited by semantic and syntactic
violations, such as N400 and P600. Sixteen healthy subjects
participated in the study, who were native speakers of Japanese. We
tested 2 types of dependencies, which were selectional restriction
between verb and noun (SR type, semantic task) and the dependency
between a sentence-final particle and an interrogative phrase (WH-Q
type, syntactic task). The test sentences comprised 60 pairs of
controls and anomalies, which were presented visually in a random
order. Each sentence comprised three phrases, and the dependencies
hold between second and third phrase. ERPs were recorded from 58
channels starting from 192 msec prior to the presentation of the
third phrase and lasted for 1524 msec. It was found that the offset
response elicited by SR type showed a reversed pattern of
sink-source combinations in the scalp current density mapping
relative to N400, whereas this was not true for the WH-Q type. The
finding suggests a possibility that the semantic processing is
actively suppressed following the stimulus offset, whereas the
syntactic processing is not.
|
