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.

是否会通过与我们的语言知识和期望有所背离的句法违规而在事件相关的光信号中引发与语法相关的不匹配活动。在当前的研究中，我们采用了频域血氧饱和度计进行快速光学神经成像检查，以检查非有限补语子句中对英语裸不定式的句法违背是否会触发与语法相关的不匹配效应。裸露或全不定式结构的句子记录（没有或“到”不定式标记）与语法正确或不正确的版本和非语法词项（动词）被提交给英语为母语（ñ = 8）在无声电影观看过程中，这是一个被动的怪胎任务。对源强度（即最小规范电流幅度）的分析表明，与其他语法违规和非结构性词汇要素相比，裸对象不定式的句法类别违规导致明显更强的光学失配效应。该失配响应在左前颞上回的峰值潜伏期为186 ms。结合我们之前的MEG报告（Kubota等人，Neurosci Lett 662：195–204，2018），目前的光学神经影像学发现表明句法标记（未标记到标记））完全违反心理语法规则的不定物体会以与MEG扫描完全相同的方式增强信号强度，包括错配活动的峰值潜伏期和大脑的激活区域。