Abstract for Arild Hestvik's talk

Brain responses to filled gaps
Arild Hestvik (CUNY Graduate Center)
September 26, 2006 (Tuesday)
6:30 PM - ; Room 7102, The CUNY Graduate Center

An unresolved issue in the study of sentence comprehension is whether the process of gap-filling is mediated by the construction of empty categories, or whether the parser relates fillers directly to the associated verb's argument structure. We conducted an ERP study that used the violation paradigm to examine the time course and spatial distribution of brain responses to ungrammatically filled gaps. The results indicate that the earliest brain response to the violation is an early left anterior negativity (eLAN). According to Friederici's time course model of parsing, this ERP indexes an early phase of pure syntactic structure building, temporally preceding ERPs that reflect semantic integration and argument structure satisfaction (LAN, N400). The finding can therefore be interpreted as evidence that gap-filling is initially mediated by structurally predicted empty categories, rather than by associating the filler directly with argument structure elements.

The research reported in this talk was conducted in collaboration with Nathan Maxfield (University of South Florida), Richard Schwartz (CUNY Graduate Center) & Valerie Shafer (CUNY Graduate Center).