& Only little systematic research has examined event-related brain potentials (ERPs) elicited by the cognitive processing of music. The present study investigated how music processing is influenced by a preceding musical context, affected by the task relevance of unexpected chords, and influenced by the degree and the probability of violation. Four experiments were conducted in which ``nonmusicians' ' listened to chord sequences, which infrequently contained a chord violating the sound expectancy of listeners. Integration of in-key chords into the musical context was reflected as a late negative-frontal deflection in the ERPs. This negative deflection declined towards the end of a chord sequence, reflecting normal buildup of musical context. Brain waves elicited by chords with unexpected notes revealed two ERP effects: an early righthemispheric preponderant-anterior negativity, which was taken to reflect the violation of sound expectancy; and a late bilateral-frontal negativity. The late negativity was larger compared to in-key chords and taken to reflect the higher degree of integration needed for unexpected chords. The early right-anterior negativity (ERAN) was unaffected by the task relevance of unexpected chords. The amplitudes of both early and late negativities were found to be sensitive to the degree of musical expectancy induced by the preceding harmonic context, and to the probability for deviant acoustic events. The employed experimental design opens a new field for the investigation of music processing. Results strengthen the hypothesis of an implicit musical ability of the human brain. &

We recorded event-related brain potentials (ERPs) while participants read sentences, some of which contained an anomalous word. In the critical sentences (e.g., The meal was devouring...), the syntactic cues unambiguously signaled an Agent interpretation of the subject noun, whereas the semantic cues supported a Theme interpretation. An Agent interpretation would render the main verb semantically anomalous (as meals do not devour things). Conversely, the Theme interpretation would render the main verb syntactically anomalous (as the-ED form, not the-ING form, is syntactically appropriate for this interpretation). We report that the main verbs in such sentences elicit the P600 effect associated with syntactic anomalies, rather than the N400 effect associated with semantic anomalies. We conclude that, at least under certain conditions, semantic information is ‘‘in control’ ’ of how words are combined during sentence processing. Ó 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The current research addresses the hypothesis that certain aspects of sequential cognition have made substantial contributions to the human language processing capability, from a functional neurophysiology perspective. We first describe a cognitive sequence processing model that was developed based on the functional neuroanatomy of primate cortex and basal ganglia. We demonstrate how this model is capable of simulating the behavior of human infants in extracting serial, temporal and abstract structure from language-like sound sequences as revealed in recent psycholinguistic experiments. We then demonstrate how, through training, this model can perform adult level syntactic comprehension, based on dissociated processing streams for open vs. closed class words. The model subsequently predicts: (1) that impaired syntactic processing (as in agrammatic aphasia) will be associated with impairments in corresponding non-linguistic cognitive sequencing tasks, and (2) that neurophysiological processes (as revealed by ERPs) involved in syntactic processing should also be involved in the corresponding non-linguistic cognitive sequencing tasks. Data confirming these predictions are reviewed. We conclude that the study of sequential cognition will provide a new paradigm for the investigation of the neurophysiological bases of language.

We recorded event-related brain potentials (ERPs) during the processing of unambiguous German sentences containing different types of filler-gap dependency. Both topicalization constructions and wh-questions were found to elicit a left-anterior negativity (LAN) prior to the processing of the subcategorizing verb, relative to a gap-free control condition. At the subcategorizing verb, sentences containing a wh-dependency produced a parietal positivity (P600) relative to topicalization structures. These results support the claim that separable parsing processes are involved in the processing of syntactic dependencies, with working memory based processes being reflected in a LAN, and the relative difficulty of integrating the filler with its subcategorizer reflected in a P600. Integration cost but not memory cost was found to be influenced by the type of filler-gap dependency involved.

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A central question in online human sentence comprehension is: how are linguistic relations established between different parts of a sentence? Previous work has shown that this dependency resolution process can be computationally expensive, but the underlying reasons for this are still unclear. We argue that dependency resolution is mediated by cue-based retrieval, constrained by independently motivated working memory principles defined in a cognitive architecture (ACT-R). To demonstrate this, we investigate an unusual instance of dependency resolution, the processing of negative and positive polarity items, and confirm a surprising prediction of the cue-based retrieval model: partial cue-matches—which constitute a kind of similarity-based interference—can give rise to the intrusion of ungrammatical retrieval candidates, leading to both processing slow-downs and even errors of judgment that take the form of illusions of grammaticality in patently ungrammatical structures. A notable achievement is that good quantitative fits are achieved without adjusting the key model parameters.

This paper is meant to be an introduction to connectionism for linguists. It covers fundamentals of connectionism and applications of connectionism to human language processing. Because the first (and the last for some) question that linguists want to ask is "why bother with connectionism?" it would be appropriate to try to answer this question first. A quick and rather naive answer is that both linguistics and connectionism are branches of cognitive science, the science of human mind. However, there seem to be two main sources of skepticism against connectionism. (1) Connectionism is an offspring of behaviorism, which is refuted as a method for investigating language by Chomsky decades ago. (2) Connectionism could be used to implement linguistic theory, but it does not provide a new perspective. This section tries to refute these skepticisms and tries to indicate how connectionism may contribute to the understanding of language. 1.1 Behaviorism and connectionism

Although meaning has been a constant interest in psycholinguistics, the concepts and methods of formal semantics have been rarely used to make sense of empirical data. In this thesis we try to fill this gap presenting the results of two ERP studies on Dutch temporal semantics. In the first, we investigate the e#ects elicited by tense violations in temporal adverb constructions. The observed P600/SPS is interpreted as an index of semantic rather than morphosyntactic processing. Reichenbach's distinction between event and reference time is used to account for the LAN elicited by sentences in which the main verb is placed before the adverbial modifier. In the second study, we propose a refinement of an earlier experiment on English temporal connectives. We investigate the e#ects of manipulating world knowledge and the order in which events are mentioned in discourse. Factorial analyses and direct comparisons between conditions indicate that sentences with di#erent inferential properties, triggered by the selective activation of world knowledge from declarative memory, have di#erent ERP correlates. In brief, our work suggests that the use of formal semantics within the ERP paradigm can reinforce the criticism of existing hypotheses and accelerate the process of generation and testing of new ones.

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Introduction Results Methods Recent work on language comprehension using on-line behavioral measures has led to two main accounts: the structure-driven serial account and the interactive account. Structure-driven serial models hold that initial parsing processes are restricted to syntactic knowledge such as word category information and phrase structure rules and are independent of semantic and pragmatic information (Frazier, 1987). According to the second view, the interactive approach, these different aspects interact continuously during comprehension (e.g. McClelland et al., 1989). To distinguish between these accounts it is of particular interest to explore the properties and timing of the different processes involved. Most research on language comprehension using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) has focused on semantic aspects of comprehension. Less work has been concerned with the processing of syntactic information. These studies have identified (