Syntactic constructions drive cortical tracking in the absence of lexical content: an electrophysiological investigation of sentence processing during reading

ABSTRACT

Previous work has established that neural oscillations can temporally synchronise with the occurrence of multi-unit linguistic representations but that neural synchrony to phrase boundaries is reduced in the absence of lexical content . In this study, we extend these findings to test whether reducing parsing ambiguity eliminates the reduction in phrase tracking associated with a lack of lexical content. Building on previous work, we reduced word-level parsing ambiguity by visually presenting sentences, and we reduced phrase-level parsing ambiguities by using the caused-motion construction for all sentences. Results indicated no difference in word or phrase-level tracking when comparing English and jabberwocky stimuli. We interpret this finding as indicating that tracking phrase structure can take place in the absence of content words if parsing ambiguities are sufficiently reduced.

KEYWORDS:

• Neural synchrony
• oscillations
• EEG
• syntax
• language comprehension

Acknowledgements

We thank Adele Goldberg for comments on a previous version of this paper. We also thank Cas Coopmans and an anonymous reviewer for comments and suggestions that have greatly improved this paper. Any remaining faults in the article are, of course, our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data Availability Statement

Data are located at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8157645

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