Dissociating Brain Responses to Syntactic and Semantic Anomalies: Evidence from Event-Related Potentials

Two experiments investigated the influence of anomaly type and presentation rate on the occurrence and appearance of the event-related brain potentials (ERPs) known as the N400 and P600. In Experiment 1, sentences containing either a syntactic anomaly, a semantic anomaly, or a compound syntactic and semantic anomaly were presented at the rate of 1000 ms per word. Consistent with previous findings, syntactic anomalies elicited a P600, while semantic anomalies elicited an N400. Compound anomalies evoked an N400 P600 waveform complex. Experiment 2 investigated the effect of presentation rate on ERPs using the syntactic anomaly materials from Osterhout and Holcomb (1992; Experiment 1) at the 650 ms SOA from the original study and a new 1000 ms SOA. Although the amplitude and latency of the P600 waveform differed slightly between the two presentation rates, reliable P600s were found at both the 650 and the 1000 ms SOA.