Local syntactic violations evoke fast mismatch-related neural activity detected by optical neuroimaging
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Local syntactic violations evoke fast mismatch‑related neural activity detected by optical neuroimaging Mikio Kubota1,2 · Luca Pollonini2 · George Zouridakis2 Received: 10 May 2020 / Accepted: 5 September 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract It remains to be investigated whether syntax-related mismatch activity would be evoked in event-related optical signals by syntactic violations that deviate from our language knowledge and expectations. In the current study, we have employed fast optical neuroimaging with a frequency-domain oximeter to examine whether syntactic violations of English bare infinitives in the non-finite complement clause would trigger syntax-related mismatch effects. Recorded sentences of bare or full infinitive structures (without or with the ‘to’ infinitival marker) with syntactically correct or incorrect versions and non-syntactic lexical items (verbs) were presented to native speakers of English (n = 8) during silent movie viewing as a passive oddball task. The analysis of source strength (i.e., minimum norm current amplitudes) revealed that the syntactic category violations of bare object infinitives led to significantly more robust optical mismatch effects than the other syntactic violation and non-structural, lexical elements. This mismatch response had a peak latency of 186 ms in the left anterior superior temporal gyrus. In combination with our prior MEG report (Kubota et al. in Neurosci Lett 662:195–204, 2018), the present optical neuroimaging findings show that syntactic marking (unmarked-to-marked) violations of the bare object infinitive against the rule of the mental grammar enhance the signal strength exactly in the same manner seen with MEG scanning, including the peak latency of mismatch activity and the activated area of the brain. Keywords Optical neuroimaging · Event-related optical signals (EROS) · Fast optical signal (FOS) · Oddball paradigm · Syntax · Language
Introduction The last 30 years have seen a great advancement in noninvasive neuroimaging technologies, which can be utilized to help define regional structure–function relationships in the human brain (Zago et al. 2012). Although experimental analysis of human behaviors started in the 1950s (Azrin and Lindsley 1956; Holland 1957) this extensive 60-year history of behavioral experiments (Okouchi 1993) examined basically two main variables (accuracy rates and reaction time) when subjects performed cognitive or psychophysical tasks. Communicated by Melvyn A. Goodale. * Mikio Kubota [email protected] 1
Department of English, Seijo University, Tokyo 157‑8511, Japan
Department of Engineering Technology, University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA
2
Presently, combining an examination of neural responses along with behavioral responses can lead to a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of how humans act, feel, or recall. A deeper understanding of the processes by which the brain and the conscious mind communicate can provide a new, more detailed c
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