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Local syntactic violations evoke fast mismatch-related neural activity detected by optical neuroimaging

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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.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Kathy Low, PhD for her technical assistance. We are also thankful to Tamar Aprahamian, PhD of JetPub Scientific Communications for the preparation of this manuscript, in accordance with Good Publication Practice (GPP3) guidelines.

Funding

The present project was supported by the Grant-in-Aid for Exploratory Research, The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in Japan [no. 19K00801] and the 2019–2020 Seijo University Special Research Grant, both awarded to MK.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of English, Seijo University, Tokyo, 157-8511, Japan

    Mikio Kubota

  2. Department of Engineering Technology, University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA

    Mikio Kubota, Luca Pollonini & George Zouridakis

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  1. Mikio Kubota
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  2. Luca Pollonini
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  3. George Zouridakis
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Contributions

MK: project administration, conceptualization, research design, sound recording and editing, experimental coding, data collection, data analysis, visualization, resources, writing–original draft and editing, funding acquisition; LP: conceptualization, research design, experimental coding, data collection, data analysis, visualization, resources, writing–editing; GZ: project administration, conceptualization, research design, experimental coding, data collection, data analysis, resources, writing–editing.

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Correspondence to Mikio Kubota.

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Communicated by Melvyn A. Goodale.

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Kubota, M., Pollonini, L. & Zouridakis, G. Local syntactic violations evoke fast mismatch-related neural activity detected by optical neuroimaging. Exp Brain Res 238, 2665–2684 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-020-05922-8

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