Head errors of syntactic dependency increase neuromagnetic mismatch intensities
- PDF / 3,984,879 Bytes
- 24 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 32 Downloads / 177 Views
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Head errors of syntactic dependency increase neuromagnetic mismatch intensities Mikio Kubota1,2,3,4 · Junko Matsuzaki3 · Ippeita Dan2,5 · Haruka Dan2 · George Zouridakis4 Received: 30 January 2020 / Accepted: 4 July 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Mismatch-related brain activation in healthy individuals is an important area of neural investigation. Previously, we evaluated sentence-level syntactic dependencies, composed of a head and a dependent between two syntactically related words in head-initial English structures. We demonstrated that prominent mismatch effects were induced by within-category dependent errors when semantic interpretation was preserved. However, the following issues were not addressed: (1) whether head errors of syntactic dependency in head-final structures would elicit large mismatch field (MMF) intensities, and (2) whether an MMF effect of syntactic errors would be seen in the left superior temporal cortex alone. In this study, auditory MMFs were obtained by magnetocephalography (MEG) from healthy Japanese adults (n = 8) who were subjected to a passive auditory oddball paradigm with syntactically legal or illegal utterances and single words in Japanese. The results demonstrate that the source waveforms had significantly higher MMF cortical activation in response to the head error, which involved altered polarity of the predicate. This resulted in a syntactically incorrect and semantically incomprehensible expression, when compared to the syntactically correct expression and the non-structural lexical item. This mismatch effect, with a peak latency of 164 ms, was confined to the anterior region of the left superior temporal cortex. The current results clearly indicate that the representation of syntactic dependency is stored in long-term memory and tends to be activated in automatic auditory processing. Keywords Magnetoencephalography (MEG) · Mismatch magnetic field (MMF) · Oddball paradigm · Syntactic dependency error · Weighted minimum-norm estimation
Introduction
Communicated by Melvyn A. Goodale. * Mikio Kubota [email protected] 1
Department of English, Seijo University, 6‑1‑20, Seijo, Setagaya‑ku, Tokyo 157‑8511, Japan
2
Functional Brain Science Lab, Jichi Medical University, Tochigi, Japan
3
Lurie Family Foundations MEG Imaging Center, Department of Radiology, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA, USA
4
Department of Engineering Technology, University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA
5
Department of Integrated Sciences and Engineering for Sustainable Society, Chuo University, Tokyo, Japan
Individuals with normal language functions are able to detect language errors made by others easily, instantly, and without any special effort. Syntactically deviant sentences intuitively sound strange to native speakers and syntactic anomalies evoke larger electrophysiological responses than syntactically correct phrases. Three different syntax-related neural components of brain activity thought
Data Loading...
