Syntactic parsing preferences and their on-line revisions: a spatio-temporal analysis of event-related brain potentials

The present study investigates the processes involved in the recovery from temporarily ambiguous garden-path sentences. Event-related brain potentials (ERP) were recorded while subjects read German subject-object ambiguous relative and complement clauses. As both clause types are initially analyzed as subject-first structures, object-first structures require a revision which is more difficult for complement than for relative clauses. The hypothesis is tested that the revision process consists of two sub-processes, namely diagnosis and actual reanalysis. Applying a spatio-temporal principal component analysis to the ERP data, distinct positive sub-components presumably reflecting different sub-processes could be identified in the time range of the P300 and P600. It will be argued that the P600 is not a monolithic component, and that different subprocesses may be involved at varying time points depending on the type of garden-path sentence. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.