Mapping sentence form onto meaning: The syntax–semantic interface

Review
Mapping sentence form onto meaning:
The syntax–semantic interface
Angela D. Friederici a, ⁎, Jürgen Weissenborn a,b
a Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Stephanstr. 1a, 04103 Leipzig, Germany
b Department of German Language and Linguistics, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany
A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T
Article history:
Accepted 10 August 2006
Available online 7 September 2006
Keywords:
Syntax
Word category
Verb argument structure
LAN
N400
Abbreviations:
ERP, event related brain potential
LAN, left anterior negativity
ELAN, early left anterior negativity
N400, negativity around 400 ms
P600, positivity around 600 ms
1. Introduction
The understanding of sentences involves not only the retrieval of the meaning of single
words, but the identification of the relation between a verb and its arguments. The way
the brain manages to process word meaning and syntactic relations during language
comprehension on-line still is a matter of debate. Here we review the different views
discussed in the literature and report data from crucial experiments investigating the
temporal and neurotopological parameters of different information types encoded in
verbs, i.e. word category information, the verb’s argument structure information, the
verb’s selectional restriction and the morphosyntactic information encoded in the verb’s
inflection. The neurophysiological indices of the processes dealing with these different
information types suggest an initial independence of the processing of word category
information from other information types as the basis of local phrase structure building,
and a later processing stage during which different information types interact. The
relative ordering of the subprocesses appears to be universal, whereas the absolute timing
of when during later phrases interaction takes places varies as a function of when the
relevant information becomes available. Moreover, the neurophysiological indices for
non-local dependency relations vary as a function of the morphological richness of the
language.
The comprehension of language in everyday communication
involves more than the retrieval of the meaning of single
words. Although the latter is a necessary pre-condition for
comprehension, the syntactic relation between the verb and
its arguments is crucial for the understanding of the message
encoded in a sentence. During normal on-line comprehension,
several aspects of each upcoming element must be
checked to allow the element’s integration into the prior
context, and, ultimately, to allow the sentence to be
⁎ Corresponding author. Fax: +49 341 99 40 113.
E-mail address: angelafr@cbs.mpg.de (A.D. Friederici).
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0006-8993/$ – see front matter © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.brainres.2006.08.038
© 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
interpreted. The processing system needs to retrieve the
syntactic and semantic information encoded in each element.
As the relevant syntactic information is encountered,
the system must check the element’s word category (e.g.,
determiner, noun, verb etc.) to allow the build up of a local
phrase structure. For a verb, its argument structure must be
checked (e.g., transitive, intransitive) in order to know how
many arguments the particular verb takes. As relevant
semantic information is encountered, the processing system
has to check whether the verb’s arguments fulfil the
selectional restrictions of the verb (e.g., animacy and other

semantic features). Last but not least, the system has to
process the morphosyntactic information encoded in the
verb’s inflection in order to identify the grammatical relation
between the verb and its argument (e.g., subject–verb
agreement).
Different psycholinguistic theories agree that all these
information types must be retrieved and used to guarantee
normal comprehension, but there is still some debate over
the time course of these processes and the nature of the
interplay between lexical–semantic and syntactic information.
The interactive approach holds that each information
type interacts with each other at every point in time
(Marslen-Wilson and Tyler, 1980; MacDonald et al., 1992,
1994a,b; McClelland et al., 1989; Trueswell and Tanenhaus,
1994). The serial approach maintains that local phrase
structure building precedes the processing of other information
types (DeVincenzi, 1991; Frazier, 1978, 1987a,b;
Gorrell, 1995, 1998). Within the serial approach, researchers
have argued that the input first undergoes a syntactic
analysis before lexical–semantic information is taken into
account (Frazier, 1978; Frazier and Fodor, 1978). Although
interaction between syntactic and lexical–semantic information
is assumed to take place during a later processing
stage, the initial phase is modeled to take only word
category information into consideration for the basis of
which an initial phrase structure is built. Overviews
concerning the behavioral evidence for each of these
views are given in Mitchell (1994); Tanenhaus and Trueswell
(1995); Frazier and Clifton (1996) and in different
articles published in the texts edited by Garfield (1987);
Tanenhaus and Carlson (1989); Altmann (1990); Balota et al.
(1990); Simpson (1991), Clifton et al., (1994); Hemforth and
Konieczny (2000). Each different model is supported by
empirical data from behavioral experiments, thus disallowing
a final conclusion with respect to the ultimate cognitive
architecture of sentence processing. Rather than reiterate
the behavioral results in support of the one or the other
view, the present article will discuss recent neurophysiological
data against the background of a neurocognitive
model of language processing (Friederici, 1995, 2002).
The neurocognitive model assumes an initial phase
(Phase 1) during which local phrase structure building
based on word category information takes places, preceding
the processing of other information types during on-line
sentence comprehension. Thus, word category information
is needed to license further integration processes. In the
next processing stage (Phase 2), further syntactic and
semantic processes take place in parallel revealing the
syntactic and the thematic relations as well as the semantic
relations between words. The output of these parallel
processes serves as the input to a final stage of integration
(Phase 3) where the different information types interact to
achieve a final interpretation (Friederici, 2002, compare
Table 1).
The present version of the proposal assumes that the
timing relation of these three processes is fixed, but that the
time window for each stage can vary as a function of the
particular stimulus material or language, the stimulus presentation
parameters as well as the experimental paradigm
and task.
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Here, findings from recent event-related brain potential
(ERP) studies that focused on the time course of syntactic and
lexical–semantic processes in different languages and paradigms
will be reviewed. We restrict our discussion to those
sentence processing studies that have worked with a violation
paradigm including the following different violation types:
phrase structure violation, subject–verb agreement violation,
verb argument violation and violation of a verb’s selectional
restrictions. All of these studies center around the processing
of verbs and the information encoded therein. The central role
of verb information for language processing has been
acknowledged by linguistic theory (Fillmore, 1968; Jackendoff,
2002) as well as psycholinguistic modeling (Mitchell, 1994;
Tanenhaus et al., 1991). We will see that seemingly equivocal
neurophysiological data may ‘fall into place’ once the relation
between the verb and its language-specific arguments is
considered.
ERP studies conducted over the past two decades have
identified different ERP components which have been
interpreted to relate to different functions during language
comprehension. A centro-parietally distributed negativity,
label N400, has been found in relation to difficulties of both
semantic integration (e.g., Kutas and Hillyard, 1980; Kutas
and Van Petten, 1994, Brown and Hagoort, 1993; Chwilla et
al., 1995 from Hahne and Friederici, 2002) and the processing
of thematic information (e.g., Friederici and Frisch, 2000;
Frisch and Schlesewsky, 2001; Frisch et al., 2004). Syntactic
processes have been discussed with respect to left anterior
negativities (ELAN/LAN) and to late centro-parietal positivities
(P600) (for overviews, see Hagoort et al., 1999; Friederici,
2002). More recently, P600 effects were also reported for the
processing of semantic/thematic violation in sentence context
(for an overview, see Kuperberg, 2007). The present
discussion, however, will primarily focus on the syntaxrelated
effects.
A major issue in the discussion of syntax-related effects
concerns the presence and absence of ELAN/LAN effects, their
latency (early vs. late), as well as their topography (left
Table 1
Phases Violation
types
ERP
correlates
Functions
Phase 1 Phrase structure ELAN Local phrase structure
building
Phase 2 Subject–verb
agreement
Verb argument LAN/N400 b
Verb selectional
restriction
Phase 3 Possible for all
types
LAN a
N400
P600 Integration
Assignment of syntactic/
thematic relations and
semantic relations
a Presence/absence depending on the degree to which syntactic
relations are assigned on the basis of inflectional morphology in a
given language.
b Within one language (e.g., German) depending on the violation
realization, i.e. incorrect number of arguments or incorrect
argument case marking and between languages depending on
whether realized in a scrambling language (e.g., German) or in a
fixed word order language (e.g., English).
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52 B R A I N R E S E A R C H 1 1 4 6 ( 2 0 0 7 ) 5 0 – 5 8
lateralized vs. bilateral). The ultimate solution for the variance
across different studies in the literature is not simple as the
studies have used different violation types, languages and
modalities. All these parameters may influence the appearance
of the E/LAN effects. Here we will mainly consider the
parameters of violation types and languages 1 .
Linguistic theories would predict differences between
violations of word category information, relevant for the
local phrase structure, and subject–verb agreement violation,
relevant for the structural dependency between the NPs
(arguments) and the verb in a sentence. While processes
concerning violations of word category may be similar
across languages, processes involved in subject–verb agreement
may differ as a function of language because
languages differ in how much the assignment of grammatical
roles depends on morphology, i.e. person, number and
case marking. We will take up these two issues and the
relevant ERP data in turn.
2. Computing local phrase structure
The computation of a local phrase is based on word category
information retrieved from the word as it is available. A
number of ERP studies investigating word category violations
have reported an ELAN in different languages (for English, see
Neville et al. (1991) for *Max’s of proof/Max’s proof; Münte et al.
(1993) for *your write/you write; Kubota et al. (2004) for 7a *I
believe him is a spy/I believe he is a spy).
In German, ELAN effects were reported in studies investigating
word category violations in sentences containing
prepositional phrases requiring a noun for their completion,
but in which a verb was presented instead for example *die
Pizza wurde im gegessen/the pizza was in-the eaten//die Pizza
wurde gegessen/the pizza was eaten (Friederici et al., 1993; Hahne
and Friederici, 1999, 2002 in EEG studies and in MEG studies
Knösche et al., 1999; Friederici et al., 2000). The syntax-related
negativity was present early, i.e. about 150 ms post word onset
when word category information was signaled by the prefix
(see references above), but late with respect to word onset
when word category was provided by the suffix (Friederici et
al., 1996, 2004; Hagoort et al., 2003). This means that the effect
was early with respect to the word category decision point.
The studies seem to show an early left anterior negativity, i.e.
an ELAN, when time-locked to the word category decision
point.
The word category decision point is also relevant in the
interpretation of the results from experiments conducted by
Van den Brink and Hagoort (2004). In their study, Dutch
sentence material was used in which the word category verb
was signaled by a suffix -de as in kliederde/messed. As the first
1 Violation type and language being equal, we have argued that
the ELAN component reflecting highly automatic syntactic
processing of phrase structure building is more likely to be
observed during the processing of connected speech than for
visually presented language, especially when words are presented
individually with pauses of 300 ms or more between each
word or when the visual input is hampered by low visual contrast
(Gunter et al., 1999).
part of the crucial word klieder/mess can be read as a noun, one
would predict that the word klieder -de in a noun context only
elicits a left anterior negativity after the onset of the suffix -de.
And this is exactly what was found.
An ELAN was also found for word category violations in
non-Indo-European languages, e.g., in so-called BA constructions
in Chinese, which requires that the following element be
a noun instead of a verb, in sentences such as *the stylist BA cut/
the stylist BA the cloth cut (Ye et al., 2006). The ELAN has also
been found for word category violations in Japanese sentence
processing (Mueller et al., 2005).
Interestingly, those studies in English and Dutch that have
not found an ELAN used syntactically legal but less frequent
syntactic structures and not outright violations (e.g., in Dutch,
Hagoort et al., 1993). Ainsworth-Darnell et al. (1998) report an
absence of an ELAN for the following sentences: Jill entrusted
the recipe to friends before.../Jill entrusted the recipe friends before, at
their critical word friends. The absence of an ELAN, however, is
not surprising as the word friends is a possible grammatically
correct continuation in a sentence: Jill entrusted the recipe
friends like most. This means that a noun after the first sentence
part is correct under certain conditions; therefore, no ELAN is
observed.
From the combined studies, we may conclude that an ELAN
is observed whenever an incoming item’s word category
violates the local syntactic prediction and that the latency as
measured from the word onset varies, but is always early
when measured from the word category decision point.
The data at hand are in support of a model that predicts
ELAN effects as a reflection of an initial phase of local phrase
structure building. More recently, there are data suggesting
that the amplitude of the ELAN may vary depending on
whether ungrammaticality can be decided on the basis of the
immediately preceding context alone or whether non-local
preceding context has to be taken into account (Lau et al.,
2006).
3. Computing dependency relations
3.1. Processing inflectional morphology of verbs
When retrieving meaning from sentences, the information
encoded in the verb inflection, in particular, the information
of number and person, is most relevant and in some
languages it is essential for the assignment of grammatical
roles (subject vs. object) in sentences. While in languages with
a fixed word order this information may be unnecessary for
the sentence’s interpretation, it is crucial for languages with
free word order. Although Osterhout and Mobley (1995) found
a LAN in a subject–verb disagreement in English, a language
with a fixed word order, in simple declarative sentences,
subject–verb agreement errors (plural vs. singular) often do
not elicit a LAN (Kutas and Hillyard, 1983). On the other hand,
languages in which grammatical relations more heavily rely
on morphosyntactic information, LAN effects can be observed
(Penke et al., 1997; Angrilli et al., 2002; Silva-Pereyra and
Carreiras, 2006).
Across different languages, a variety of morphosyntactic
violation types have been investigated. Two violation types

have been examined in at least more than one language,
namely subject–verb agreement and determiner–noun agreement.
Those studies that focused on gender agreement
between nouns and their corresponding determiner or their
adjective do not always report LAN effects. It may not be
surprising that gender agreement violations elicit less stable
ERP effects because gender information is part of the lexical
entry and in some languages is phonologically constrained
by the lexical form of the noun (in Spanish) while in others
this is largely not the case (in French). In Spanish, LANs
(Carreiras et al., 2004) or P600s (Barber et al., 2004) were
observed, whereas in Dutch (Hagoort and Brown, 1999; Van
Berkum et al., 2000) and in French (Foucart and Frenck-
Mestre, 2004) P600s were found.
For subject–verb agreement violations, stable ERP effects
across different languages with strong inflectional morphology
have been reported. Violations of number agreement
between subject–noun and verb elicited a LAN in German
(Penke et al., 1997) and in Italian (Angrilli et al., 2002;
DeVincenzi et al., 2003). In another German study in which
no LAN effect was found (Münte et al., 1997), the crucial
sentences did not contain outright violations but were
obscured by a lexical ambiguity of the subject pronoun (sie
which is ambiguous in number she/they). Therefore, these
findings do not challenge the argument that, in languages in
which inflectional morphology (i.e. subject–verb agreement) is
relevant for the assignment of grammatical roles, a LAN is
observed. The latter view is corroborated by a study conducted
in Hebrew, a language with noun–verb agreement in which
noun gender agreement is relevant for the assignment of
grammatical roles (Deutsch and Bentin, 2001). In this study, as
expected based on relevance of this information for grammatical
role assignment, a clear LAN effect was found for gender
agreement violation between the noun and the verb.
Thus, LAN effects appear observable in languages in which
the identification of grammatical relations depends upon the
subject–verb agreement as signaled either by number, person
and/or gender features. 2
3.2. Processing information of argument nouns
The grammatical relations between a verb and its arguments
in languages with free word order, such as German or
Japanese, are not only marked by the verb’s inflection but
moreover by the noun phrase’s inflection in the form of case
marking.
2 Tense agreement between the main verb and its auxiliary also
seems to elicit LAN effects. This was observed for German
(Friederici et al., 1993) in Dutch (Gunter et al., 1997) and in English
(Osterhout and Nicol, 1999). Another study, however, in English
using tense violations to test for grammatical violations (*has
catch/has caught) did not find LAN (Kemmer and Kutas, 2006). In
this latter study, the absence of a LAN could be due to the fact
that the material used is ambiguous as the word has can be read
as a main verb (e.g., he has fish in his box) and the word catch can be
read as a noun. This interpretation is supported by Friederici et al.
(1996) who demonstrated that an ELAN was only observed for
outright violations, but not for ambiguous constructions where
the crucial element could either be an auxiliary (wurde/was) or a
main verb (wurde/became).
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When reviewing the relevant literature, it seems that
violations of the verb’s argument structure and its arguments
either lead to a LAN or to an N400 depending on the language,
and within a given language depending on the type of
violation between the verb and its arguments in a sentence.
When considering a verb’s argument structure, it is important
to recognize that there are two ways it can be violated. A
violation can be realized as a mismatch between the number
of available arguments and those required by the verb or as a
mismatch between the case marking of a given argument and
that required by the verb.
For German verb argument structure violations, such as
Der Mann wurde geweint/The man was cried, in which an
intransitive verb was presented in a passive structure requiring
a transitive verb, a LAN was seen at the verb (Rösler et al.,
1993). A LAN/P600 was found at the sentence’s final verb when
the case of the actual object–argument (accusative) violated
the verb’s argument structure (requiring a dative marked
object argument), but an N400/P600 pattern was found when
thematic assignment was impossible due to a mismatch
between the already encountered number of arguments
(three) and the number of arguments required by the verb
(two) (Friederici and Frisch, 2000).These different patterns
were taken to reflect different aspects of verb argument
structure. The N400/P600 pattern, in particular, was related
to the fact that given the mismatch between the already
perceived number of arguments (three) and the number of
arguments the verb allowed (two) not only the grammatical
roles, but also the thematic/semantic roles of the arguments
could not be assigned. In a German study in which the two
arguments of a verb carried nominative case (Frisch and
Schlesewsky 2001), rendering the assignment of thematic
roles impossible, an N400 followed by a P600 was also
observed.
In English, a language with fixed word order, case marking
violations such as *The plane took we to paradise/The plane took
us to paradise in which there is a mismatch between the case
of the pronoun we, i.e. nominative, reserved to subjects, and
its postverbal position which in a non-interrogative clause is
reserved for objects, and object case, elicited a LAN (Coulson
etal.,1998). Notice that in German, a free word order language,
a P600 was found for a double subject structure (Frisch and
Schlesewsky, 2001).
A recent model by Schlesewsky and Bornkessel (2004) pays
credit to these findings in that it assumes two parallel
processing routes during Phase 2 of language processing: a
thematic route which considers case and when marked
unambiguously can map thematic roles directly and a
syntactic route which is used for ambiguously marked arguments
considering syntactic information (e.g., word order or
subject–verb agreement) instead. This latter route is generally
used for languages without case marking.
3.3. Processing verbs’ selectional restriction information
The processing of the selectional restriction violation of verbs
has been studied in numerous studies across different
languages. The violation of a verb’s selectional restriction
elicits an N400 effect (e.g., Friederici et al., 1993). Because the
N400 as a reflex of a semantic mismatch between the verb and
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its arguments is well established in the literature, we will
take this as a given for the further discussion (Kutas and
Hillyard, 1983; Kutas and Federmeier, 2000). Most recently, it
was shown that the amplitude of the N400 varies systematically
as a function of the number of semantic features
violating the relation between the verb and its object (Li et al.,
in press).
3.4. Assigning thematic and semantic relations
The neurocognitive model presented in the introduction
(Friederici, 2002; Friederici and Kotz, 2003) assumes that
word category based processes (Phase 1) precede processes
assigning semantic relations and thematic relations (Phase 2).
In this model, these two latter processes are assumed to be
realized in two parallel processing streams, one dealing with
semantic relations, such as selectional restrictions, and one
dealing with thematic role assignment on the basis of
morphosyntactic information, such as the verb’s inflection
(subject–verb agreement) and the noun’s case (case marking of
the verb’s arguments).
The assumption of two parallel working processing
streams during Phase 2 is based on data from experiments
which varied both semantic and syntactic factors during
sentence processing. Independence of the two factors was
found in a study by Gunter et al. (2000), but an interaction was
reported by Hagoort (2003). Thus, the data available do not
unequivocally support the notion of parallel, independent
processing streams during Phase 2. It appears that under
certain conditions the two processing streams may interact. A
crucial difference between those studies supporting interactive
processes and those supporting parallel processes again
may be the type of violation investigated. Hagoort (2003)
examined semantic and syntactic violations within a noun
phrase, i.e. between the determiner’s gender (the, neuter
gender) and the noun’s gender (umbrella, common gender)
on the one hand and between the adjective (honest) and the
noun (umbrella) on the other, and observed an N400 effect for
the pure semantic violation which was increased by the
additional gender violation. This interaction effect may be due
to the fact that gender information is lexically based and thus
not totally independent of lexical–semantic processes. Gunter
et al. (2000) manipulated anomalies across phrases in German
and evoked a violation that included gender and case
information. In doing so, they observed a LAN for the syntactic
violation (*sie bereiste den Land/she travels the (masculine) Land
(neuter)//sie bereiste das (neuter) Land (neuter)) and an N400 for
the semantic anomaly between the noun and the prior verb
(*sie befährt das Land/she drives-through the land) and found no
interaction in this time window, but a LAN plus an N400 for
the combined violation followed by a P600 whose amplitude
varied as a function of both the syntactic and the semantic
anomaly (*sie befährt den Land/she drives-through the (masculine)
land (neuter)) (Gunter et al., 2000). Thus, in this study, an
interaction was found for the P600, that is in Phase 3 of the
neurocognitive model.
For English, Kuperberg et al. (2003, 2005) also provide
compelling evidence that the P600 is modulated both by
syntactic and semantic information. These latter studies also
varied the crucial information types for elements across
phrases. It is possible that the two processing streams
assumed for Phase 2 work indeed in parallel, and that
semantic and syntactic factors mainly interact during Phase
3 when integrating syntactic and semantic representations.
4. Word category information meets other
information types
The model presented in the beginning (Friederici, 1995, 2002;
Friederici and Kotz, 2003) and sketched out in Table 1 makes
clear predictions with respect to the independence of initial
phrase structure building from processes dealing with semantic
information, with verb argument structure and with
subject–verb agreement. In the following section, evidence
for this prediction will be reviewed.
4.1. Word category and semantic information
The most straightforward issue, given the discussion above,
may be the possible interplay of word category information
and semantic information.
Studies in German revealed that combined word category
and selectional restriction violations lead to an ERP pattern
similar to that seen for syntactic violations only, namely an
ELAN/P600 pattern (Hahne and Friederici, 2002; Friederici et
al., 2004) under a grammaticality judgment task. When
subjects were required to ignore the syntactic violation and
to judge for semantic coherence, an early syntactic negativity
and an N400 were found (Hahne and Friederici, 2002).
These results indicate that the processing of word category
information is independent of semantic information, but
that word category information can influence semantic
processes. It appears that, during normal on-line processing,
semantic integration does not take place for words which
are not syntactically licensed (have wrong word category)
independent of whether the word category information is
available before semantic information (in the word’s prefix)
(Hahne and Friederici, 2002) or after the semantic information
(in the word’s suffix) (Friederici et al., 2004). Semantic
integration can be forced by instruction, but early syntactic
processes cannot be altered by instruction (Hahne and
Friederici, 2002).
A study in Chinese, a language with little morphosyntactic
elements but with a high number of lexical elements
which are ambiguous both with respect to meaning and
word category, also investigated combined violations of
word category and semantic relations (Ye et al., 2006). Even
in Chinese, a language in which disambiguation is mainly
carried out by contextual semantics, word category information
processes appeared prior to and independent of
semantic processes. Word category information, however,
was found to interact with word meaning already between
250 and 400 ms, which is earlier than observed in other
languages. It was speculated that this early interaction may
be due to the fact that Chinese has a large number of
ambiguous words and semantic information often is the
only information that allows disambiguation and that,
therefore, semantic information is used early during online
speech comprehension. Thus, the relative timing of

processes of Phase 1 and Phase 2 appears to be universal
across languages of different types, although the absolute
time course can vary as a function of language type.
4.2. Word category and verb argument structure
The possible interplay between word category information
based processes and verb argument structure information
was investigated in the visual and auditory modality in
German (Frisch et al., 2004). Word category violations (*Im
Garten wurde am gearbeitet/in the garden was on-the worked) in
the auditory domain elicited an ELAN/P600 and in the
visual domain a P600, whereas argument structure violations
(*Der Garten wurde oft gearbeitet/the garden was often
worked) evoked an N400/P600 in both domains. When the
two violation types were combined, no N400, but an ELAN/
P600, was observed. This again provides support for the
assumption that Phase 1 processes are independent of
Phase 2 processes, but that Phase 2 processes can be
influenced by Phase 1, such that lexical integration of an
element into the context depends on being syntactically
licensed.
4.3. Word category and subject–verb agreement
Another study in German examined the possible interplay
between word category information and morphosyntactic
information signaling subject–verb agreement (Rossi et al.,
2005). The critical word in the sentence either had the
incorrect word category (a verb in context obligatorily requiring
a noun), an incorrect inflection (2. Person Singular) in a
context obligatorily requiring another person (3. Person
Singular) or both. Agreement violations elicited a LAN (450–
650 ms) followed by a P600. Both the word category violation
and the word category/agreement combined violation evoked
an ELAN (100–200 ms) followed by a P600. The absence of the
LAN effect in the combined condition can be taken as evidence
for a functional primacy of phrase structure building processes
based on word category information (Phase 1) over
agreement processes (Phase 2).
These findings support the idea that initial structure
building processes of Phase 1 of the neurocognitive model
are independent from the subsequent Phase 2 during which
dependency relations are computed.
5. Discussion
The extraction of meaning from a sentence requires the
assignment of grammatical relations between the verb and its
arguments. When considering the underlying processes of
meaning extraction on-line, we can identify a number of
processing steps reflected in different ERP components.
Although the data available in the literature on the processing
of verb-related semantic and syntactic information during
sentence comprehension appear to be more complex than
initially thought, a certain systematicity in the data emerges
once different syntactic information types and language types
are taken into account.
B R A I N R E S E A R C H 1 1 4 6 ( 2 0 0 7 ) 5 0 – 5 8
Word category information is relevant for initial phrase
structure building (Phase 1). The computation of local phrase
structure, such as noun phrase, verb phrase and prepositional
phase, is handled by the parser prior to and independent of
other information types (for an exception, see Eckstein and
Friederici, 2006). This process of initial phrase structure
building is based on word category information. As word
category information becomes available, the parser builds a
local structure (e.g., upon encountering a preposition a
prepositional phrase is opened). That is, on the basis of the
subcategorization properties of the preposition which determine
that only nominal lexical elements, e.g., nouns, pronouns,
determiners or adjectives, but not verbal elements, e.g.,
verbs or adverbs, can immediately follow the preposition, the
parser can now make predictions with respect to the syntactic
category of the upcoming element. The detection of a
mismatch between the phrase structure-based prediction for
the word category of the upcoming word and the upcoming
word’s actual word category is reflected by the ELAN at the
word category decision point. The ERP component is called
ELAN as it is an early left anterior negativity which is early
with respect to the point at which the word category
information becomes available (i.e. in the suffix or the word
stem). The topography of this component seems to be more
anterior and more left lateralized as a function of modality,
with a more anterior (bilateral) distribution in the auditory
domain and more left (anterior/temporal) distribution in the
visual domain. Further research must determine whether the
proposed parameter for the topographic variance of the ELAN
holds. Dipole modeling indicates that the ELAN component is
generated by four dipoles, two in the left and right inferior
frontal gyri (with a stronger dipole in the left hemisphere) and
two dipoles in the anterior portion of the superior temporal
gyrus (with a stronger dipole in the left hemisphere) (Friederici
et al., 2000). Brain imaging studies evaluating local phrase
structure violations in German indicate an involvement of the
anterior superior temporal gyrus and the frontal operculum in
the inferior frontal gyrus as the neural network supporting
local phrase structure building (Friederici et al., 2003; for a
specification of this network at the level of structural
connectivity, see Friederici et al., 2006).
Other information types relevant to computed dependencies
across phrases are processed in Phase 2. These are
information for the assignment of the grammatical and
thematic roles such as subject–verb agreement, case of the
verb’s arguments and the verb’s argument structure itself as
well as semantic information. The syntactic and the semantic
processing streams dealing with the relation between
phrases appear to be independent. This independence does
not necessarily hold for within-phrase dependencies, e.g., in
a noun phrase where lexically encoded gender information
and lexical–semantic information meet. Subject–verb agreement
violations are mostly found to elicit a LAN, independent
of whether agreement is based on person (in German), on
number (in German and Italian) or on gender information (in
Hebrew). As different languages use different cues to assign
grammatical roles, either relying on a noun phrase’s position
in the sentence (in English) or on morphosyntactic information
at the noun and/or the verb (in scrambling languages
such as German or Japanese), it may not be surprising that
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ERP findings concerning syntactic role assignment vary
between different languages and/or language types.
Phase 3 is conceptualized as a phase during which
syntactic and lexical–semantic information processed during
the earlier phases is integrated. The phase is reflected in the
P600 which varies not only as a function of syntactic
complexity (Kaan et al., 2000) and syntactic anomaly (Osterhout
and Holcomb, 1993; Friederici et al., 2002), but also as a
function of semantic factors (Gunter et al., 2000). This
suggests that the different information types do interact
during this processing stage. The left posterior superior
temporal gyrus and its right homologue have been suggested
as brain regions supporting these processes (Grodzinsky and
Friederici, 2006). Further research, however, is needed to
substantiate this suggestion.
The mapping of a sentence’s form onto grammatical
function, and thereby to its meaning, appears to vary from
language to language depending on the degree to which the
assignment of grammatical roles relies on morphology. Languages
which heavily rely on morphological cues are more
likely to show a LAN than languages that do not. However, the
reported ELAN effects indicate that the basic process which
outputs the structure of phrases onto which dependencies
between phrases are built appears to be quite similar across
languages—at least those investigated up to now.
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