About Edible Restaurants: Conflicts between Syntax and Semantics as Revealed by ERPs

In order to investigate conflicts between semantics and syntax, we recorded ERPs, while participants read Dutch sentences. Sentences containing conflicts between syntax and semantics (Fred eats in a sandwich…/Fred eats a restaurant…) elicited an N400. These results show that conflicts between syntax and semantics not necessarily lead to P600 effects and are in line with the processing competition account. According to this parallel account the syntactic and semantic processing streams are fully interactive and information from one level can influence the processing at another level. The relative strength of the cues of the processing streams determines which level is affected most strongly by the conflict. The processing competition account maintains the distinction between the N400 as index for semantic processing and the P600 as index for structural processing.

• Publication year

  2010

• Venue

  Front. Psychology

• Publication date

  2010-08-06

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Computer Science, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.3389/fpsyg.2010.00222PMID 21833277PMCID 3153827
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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