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Head errors of syntactic dependency increase neuromagnetic mismatch intensities

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Abstract

Mismatch-related brain activation in healthy individuals is an important area of neural investigation. Previously, we evaluated sentence-level syntactic dependencies, composed of a head and a dependent between two syntactically related words in head-initial English structures. We demonstrated that prominent mismatch effects were induced by within-category dependent errors when semantic interpretation was preserved. However, the following issues were not addressed: (1) whether head errors of syntactic dependency in head-final structures would elicit large mismatch field (MMF) intensities, and (2) whether an MMF effect of syntactic errors would be seen in the left superior temporal cortex alone. In this study, auditory MMFs were obtained by magnetocephalography (MEG) from healthy Japanese adults (n = 8) who were subjected to a passive auditory oddball paradigm with syntactically legal or illegal utterances and single words in Japanese. The results demonstrate that the source waveforms had significantly higher MMF cortical activation in response to the head error, which involved altered polarity of the predicate. This resulted in a syntactically incorrect and semantically incomprehensible expression, when compared to the syntactically correct expression and the non-structural lexical item. This mismatch effect, with a peak latency of 164 ms, was confined to the anterior region of the left superior temporal cortex. The current results clearly indicate that the representation of syntactic dependency is stored in long-term memory and tends to be activated in automatic auditory processing.

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Acknowledgements

We thank JetPub Scientific Communications in the preparation of this manuscript, in accordance with Good Publication Practice (GPP3) guidelines.

Funding

The present project was supported by the Grant-in-Aid for Exploratory Research, The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in Japan [no. 24652132] and the 2016–2017 Seijo University Special Research Grant, both awarded to MK.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of English, Seijo University, 6-1-20, Seijo, Setagaya-ku, Tokyo, 157-8511, Japan

    Mikio Kubota

  2. Functional Brain Science Lab, Jichi Medical University, Tochigi, Japan

    Mikio Kubota, Ippeita Dan & Haruka Dan

  3. Lurie Family Foundations MEG Imaging Center, Department of Radiology, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Mikio Kubota & Junko Matsuzaki

  4. Department of Engineering Technology, University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA

    Mikio Kubota & George Zouridakis

  5. Department of Integrated Sciences and Engineering for Sustainable Society, Chuo University, Tokyo, Japan

    Ippeita Dan

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  1. Mikio Kubota
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  2. Junko Matsuzaki
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  3. Ippeita Dan
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Contributions

MK: principal investigator, project administration, conceptualization, research design, sound recording and editing, experimental coding, data collection, data analysis, visualization, resources, writing–original draft and editing, funding acquisition; JM: data analysis, visualization, resources, writing–original draft (sections MEG measurements, MEG data analysis and statistical analysis) and editing; ID and HD: data collection; GZ: conceptualization, experimental coding, resources, writing–editing.

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Correspondence to Mikio Kubota.

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Kubota, M., Matsuzaki, J., Dan, I. et al. Head errors of syntactic dependency increase neuromagnetic mismatch intensities. Exp Brain Res 238, 2137–2160 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-020-05872-1

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