Abstract
Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded while subjects silently read several prose passages, presented one word at a time. Semantic anomalies and various grammatical errors had been inserted unpredictably at different serial positions within some of the sentences. The semantically inappropriate words elicited a large N400 component in the ERP, whereas the grammatical errors were associated with smaller and less consistent components that had scalp distributions different from that of the N400. This result adds to the evidence that the N400 wave is more closely related to semantic than to grammatical processing. Additional analyses revealed that different ERP configurations were elicited by open-class (“content”) and closed-class (“function”) words in these prose passages.
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Danks, J. H., Fears, R., Bohn, L., & Hill, G. O.Comprehension processes in oral reading. Paper presented at the meeting of the Psychonomic Society, San Antonio, Texas, 1978.
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This research was supported by NSF Grant BNS80-05525 and Sloan Foundation Grant B1980-35. M. Kutas is supported by Research Scientist Development Award USPHS 1K02MH0322/03.
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Kutas, M., Hillyard, S.A. Event-related brain potentials to grammatical errors and semantic anomalies. Memory & Cognition 11, 539–550 (1983). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196991
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196991