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ERP Reflections of Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution in English Embedded Sentence as a Foreign Language

The Korean Journal of Cognitive and Biological Psychology / The Korean Journal of Cognitive and Biological Psychology, (P)1226-9654; (E)2733-466X
2007, v.19 no.4, pp.299-312
https://doi.org/10.22172/cogbio.2007.19.4.003


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Abstract

This study was conducted to find how to process an ambiguous sentence related with garden-path sentence(GPS) and early closure sentence(ECS), and to reveal the difference of contribution between their syntactic and semantic informations using ERPs. Task to be required is to read silently and respond to the presented English phrase by self-paced reading method. Analyses on behavioral response time show the significant delayed response to the controlled GPS and ECS condition. The current ERP results showed that embedded GPS sentences elicited more enhanced P600 but a slight difference of N400 while ECS sentences were more sensitive to N400 than small difference of P600. These results signify that on-line processing of ambiguity-related embedded sentence can be diverged based on the burden of interpretation of the given ambiguous word. Differential ERPs components in each type of experimental sentences suggest that the difficulty of sentential reanalysis as reflected on P600, and the need of the shift on thematic role indexed as N400 respectively were differently involved in processing English ambiguous-embedded sentences.

keywords
미로문장, 늦은종결문장, 통사적 중의성, 사건관련전위, N400, P600, garden-path sentence, early closure sentence, syntactic ambiguity, Event-related potentials(ERPs), N400, P600

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The Korean Journal of Cognitive and Biological Psychology