There is an ongoing debate whether the P600 event-related potential component following syntactic anomalies reflects syntactic processes per se, or if it is an instance of the P300, a domain-general ERP component associated with attention and cognitive reorientation.
Syntactic anomalies evoked a negative shift predominantly over the anterior scalp with a preponderance over the left hemisphere, while semantic anomalies were accompanied by a much more widespread negativity with the maximum over posterior temporal areas.
Our results suggest that the detection of non-linguistic targets defined via complex feature conjunctions in the present study and the detection of syntactic anomalies share the same underlying processes: attentional shift and memory based matching processes that act upon multi-feature conjunctions.
Also during language comprehension, Ni et al. (2000) found increased activity in left inferior frontal regions for syntactic anomalies.
In the third stage, we ran multinominal regression to explore whether our main linguistic variables (i.e., referential anomalies, syntactic complexity, and definite NPs [disregarding anomalies]) would be the best predictors of Group.
The associations between age, on the one hand, and total referential anomalies, syntactic complexity, and IQ, on the other hand, were all non-significant: age with referential anomalies: r = 0.127, p = 0.166; age with number of dependents: r = −0.086, p = 0.292; age with embedded clauses: r = −0.072, p = 0.292; age with IQ: r = 0.027, p = 0.419.
Moro, A. et al. Detecting syntactic and semantic anomalies in schizophrenia.
We explored which linguistic variables referential anomalies, syntactic complexity, and definite NPs disregarding anomalies predicted Group (Supplementary Table 10).
These P600 effects cover a rather wide range of syntactic and semantic anomalies and may reflect different underlying generator configurations, but they all seem to be evoked by an ambiguity that needs to be resolved in order to integrate the meaning of a sentence.
They did not differ significantly from NCs in terms of either referential anomalies or syntactic complexity, but produced significantly more definite NPs (disregarding anomalies) in relation to all other groups including NC (Supplementary Table 4).
