A topographical study of ERP correlates of semantic and syntactic violations in the Japanese language using the multichannel EEG system

Language processing was investigated using event-related potentials obtained using a multichannel (58-channel) EEG with regard to semantic dependency (i.e., selectional restriction between a verb and the arguments it takes; the SR type) and syntactic dependency between sentence-final particles and interrogative phrases (thr WH-Q type) in Japanese. It was found that semantic violations elicited the conventional N400, which was distributed in the bilateral occipital and the right temporal regions, and that the syntactic Violations elicited the P600 in a broad area, predominantly in the centroparietal regions. Scalp current density mappings suggested that the right temporal cortex plays a significant role in integrating pieces of contextual information, especially when it is difficult to integrated a word in the context of a sentence, and that the P600 was connected to the syntactic processes conceivably indexed by the left temporal current sink with a relatively early onset.