Constraints on Movement Phenomena in Sentence Processing: Evidence from Event-related Brain Potentials

Abstract

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 13 scalp electrodes while subjects read sentences, some of which contained a violation of constraints on constituent movement (subjacency or the empty category principle). In two experiments, the first word that indicated a violation elicited a widely distributed positive-going wave with a nonset between 250 and 300m sec and a duration of several hundred milliseconds. This effect was similar to the positive shifts that have been observed in response to other types of syntactic violations (P600), but qualitatively distinct from the N400 response elicited by semantically/pragmatically anomalous words. These findings are taken as an indication that movement constraints can be applied during the earliest stages of sentence processing, perhaps in conjunction with the creation of phrase structure. We evaluate the hypothesis that the P600 is a general electrophysiological marker of syntactic anomaly.