Elektrophysiologie komplexer sätze: Ereigniskorrelierte potentiale auf der wort- und satzebene

Event-related brain potentials were recorded in a group of German-speaking (n = 12) and a group of English-speaking subjects (n = 12) while they read sentences containing relative clauses in their respective mother language. These relative clauses were manipulated such that in half of the sentences the subject of the main clause was also the subject of the relative clause, while in the other half it served as the object of the relative clause. ERPs were recorded from 32 channels and were analysed on the word and the sentence level. On the word level the results of the English group replicated the study by King and Kutas [7] with differences at all positions following the relative pronoun. However, the comparision to the German study, which did not reveal any consistent differences, suggests that word-class differences due to the rearrangement of the word-order in the two sentence types was the reason for the differences. On the sentence level, an extended negativity was found onsetting at word 3 of the relative clause for the object-relative clauses in both languages. This is a likely correlate of the different working memory loads posed by the two sentence types. The investigation underscores the utility of sentence level ERPs.