TY - JOUR
T1 - Local syntactic violations evoke fast mismatch-related neural activity detected by optical neuroimaging
AU - Kubota, Mikio
AU - Pollonini, Luca
AU - Zouridakis, George
N1 - Funding Information:
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. 19K00801] and the 2019–2020 Seijo University Special Research Grant, both awarded to MK. Acknowledgements
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.
PY - 2020/11/1
Y1 - 2020/11/1
N2 - It remains to be investigated whether syntax-related mismatch activity would be evoked in event-related optical signals by syntactic violations that deviate from our language knowledge and expectations. In the current study, we have employed fast optical neuroimaging with a frequency-domain oximeter to examine whether syntactic violations of English bare infinitives in the non-finite complement clause would trigger syntax-related mismatch effects. Recorded sentences of bare or full infinitive structures (without or with the ‘to’ infinitival marker) with syntactically correct or incorrect versions and non-syntactic lexical items (verbs) were presented to native speakers of English (n = 8) during silent movie viewing as a passive oddball task. The analysis of source strength (i.e., minimum norm current amplitudes) revealed that the syntactic category violations of bare object infinitives led to significantly more robust optical mismatch effects than the other syntactic violation and non-structural, lexical elements. This mismatch response had a peak latency of 186 ms in the left anterior superior temporal gyrus. In combination with our prior MEG report (Kubota et al. in Neurosci Lett 662:195–204, 2018), the present optical neuroimaging findings show that syntactic marking (unmarked-to-marked) violations of the bare object infinitive against the rule of the mental grammar enhance the signal strength exactly in the same manner seen with MEG scanning, including the peak latency of mismatch activity and the activated area of the brain.
AB - It remains to be investigated whether syntax-related mismatch activity would be evoked in event-related optical signals by syntactic violations that deviate from our language knowledge and expectations. In the current study, we have employed fast optical neuroimaging with a frequency-domain oximeter to examine whether syntactic violations of English bare infinitives in the non-finite complement clause would trigger syntax-related mismatch effects. Recorded sentences of bare or full infinitive structures (without or with the ‘to’ infinitival marker) with syntactically correct or incorrect versions and non-syntactic lexical items (verbs) were presented to native speakers of English (n = 8) during silent movie viewing as a passive oddball task. The analysis of source strength (i.e., minimum norm current amplitudes) revealed that the syntactic category violations of bare object infinitives led to significantly more robust optical mismatch effects than the other syntactic violation and non-structural, lexical elements. This mismatch response had a peak latency of 186 ms in the left anterior superior temporal gyrus. In combination with our prior MEG report (Kubota et al. in Neurosci Lett 662:195–204, 2018), the present optical neuroimaging findings show that syntactic marking (unmarked-to-marked) violations of the bare object infinitive against the rule of the mental grammar enhance the signal strength exactly in the same manner seen with MEG scanning, including the peak latency of mismatch activity and the activated area of the brain.
KW - Event-related optical signals (EROS)
KW - Fast optical signal (FOS)
KW - Language
KW - Oddball paradigm
KW - Optical neuroimaging
KW - Syntax
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U2 - 10.1007/s00221-020-05922-8
DO - 10.1007/s00221-020-05922-8
M3 - Article
C2 - 32945889
AN - SCOPUS:85091168143
VL - 238
SP - 2665
EP - 2684
JO - Experimental Brain Research
JF - Experimental Brain Research
SN - 0014-4819
IS - 11
ER -