ABSTRACT

Reprocessing has been speculated to be a late higher-level cognitive process in the P600 time window in event-related potential (ERP) studies. However, uncertainties regarding the P600 as an index of reprocessing have obscured the role of reprocessing in sentence comprehension. In this study, we compared meaningless pseudowords with or without a homophonic repairing clue (homophonic pseudoword vs. ordinary pseudoword) and semantically-plus-syntactically violated real words (doubly violated) to investigate the role of reprocessing in language comprehension. All anomalous conditions elicited significant typical central-parietal P600 effects. The homophonic pseudoword condition elicited a significantly larger P600 effect than the other two anomalous conditions. No significant difference was found between the P600 effects in the ordinary pseudoword and the doubly violated real-word conditions. These results demonstrate an association between reprocessing and the observed P600 effects, supporting an active role of reprocessing in sentence comprehension. Possible implications for language processing models are also discussed.

摘要

在事件相关电位 (ERP) 研究中，再加工被推测为 P600 时间窗口中的后期高级认知过程。然而，关于 P600 作为再加工指标的不确定性掩盖了再加工在句子理解中的作用。在这项研究中，我们比较了有或没有同音修复线索的无意义伪词（谐音伪词 vs. 普通伪词）和语义加句法违规的真实词（双重违规），以研究再加工在语言理解中的作用。所有异常条件都引起了显着的典型中央顶叶 P600 效应。与其他两个异常条件相比，谐音伪词条件引起了明显更大的 P600 效应。在普通伪词和双重违反的真实词条件下，P600 效应没有发现显着差异。这些结果表明再加工与观察到的 P600 效应之间存在关联，支持再加工在句子理解中的积极作用。还讨论了对语言处理模型的可能影响。