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

Translated title of the contribution: Electrophysiology of complex sentences: Word and sentencelevel ERPs

Th F. Münte*, Schwirtz, B. M. Wieringa, M. Matzke, S. Johannes

*Corresponding author for this work
6 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

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.

Translated title of the contributionElectrophysiology of complex sentences: Word and sentencelevel ERPs
Original languageGerman
JournalEEG-EMG Zeitschrift fur Elektroenzephalographie Elektromyographie und Verwandte Gebiete
Volume28
Issue number1
Pages (from-to)11-17
Number of pages7
ISSN0012-7590
Publication statusPublished - 1997

Research Areas and Centers

  • Academic Focus: Center for Brain, Behavior and Metabolism (CBBM)

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