Chapter 12 - Using the Recording of Event-Related Brain Potentials in the Study of Sentence Processing

Abstract

This chapter explores the use of recording of event-related brain potentials in the study of sentence processing. Communication is essential to humans. Humans communicate emotions, thoughts, and intentions through several types of nonverbal mechanisms like facial expressions, gestures, body language, and signals, etc. However, it is through oral or written verbal communication that humans manage to transcend the limits of time and space. In the absence of any neurological deficit, every child acquires language in his/her first years and continues to use it productively all throughout his/her life. It has also been proposed that the positive wave termed P600 component might reflect a recomputation routine to rescue the meaning of the sentence once the reader/listener encounters a grammatical error. A strategy used to investigate this possibility involves getting rid of semantic information leaving the grammatical information intact. The rationale behind it is that in the absence of semantic information, there is no meaning to be rescued. Consequently, if the P600 is a reflection of such semantically based recomputation processes, then it decreases in amplitude or disappears under these conditions.