Journal
PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGY
Volume 60, Issue 10, Pages -Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/psyp.14332
Keywords
agreement violation; beta power; MEG; mid-frontal theta; subject-object asymmetry
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There is a debate about whether beta power effects during sentence comprehension reflect syntactic unification operations or the maintenance of sentence-level representation. This study used magnetoencephalography to investigate beta power neural dynamics during the reading of relative clause sentences with initial ambiguity. The findings support the beta-maintenance hypothesis, showing decreased beta power for grammatical violations and object-relative clause conditions in left hemisphere language regions. The brain's error detection system also registers violations and unexpected interpretations.
There remains some debate about whether beta power effects observed during sentence comprehension reflect ongoing syntactic unification operations (beta-syntax hypothesis), or instead reflect maintenance or updating of the sentence-level representation (beta-maintenance hypothesis). In this study, we used magnetoencephalography to investigate beta power neural dynamics while participants read relative clause sentences that were initially ambiguous between a subject- or an object-relative reading. An additional condition included a grammatical violation at the disambiguation point in the relative clause sentences. The beta-maintenance hypothesis predicts a decrease in beta power at the disambiguation point for unexpected (and less preferred) object-relative clause sentences and grammatical violations, as both signal a need to update the sentence-level representation. While the beta-syntax hypothesis also predicts a beta power decrease for grammatical violations due to a disruption of syntactic unification operations, it instead predicts an increase in beta power for the object-relative clause condition because syntactic unification at the point of disambiguation becomes more demanding. We observed decreased beta power for both the agreement violation and object-relative clause conditions in typical left hemisphere language regions, which provides compelling support for the beta-maintenance hypothesis. Mid-frontal theta power effects were also present for grammatical violations and object-relative clause sentences, suggesting that violations and unexpected sentence interpretations are registered as conflicts by the brain's domain-general error detection system.
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