Abstract
During sentence production, linguistic information (semantics, syntax, phonology) of words is retrieved and assembled into a meaningful utterance. There is still debate on how we assemble single words into more complex syntactic structures such as noun phrases or sentences. In the present study, event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to investigate the time course of syntactic planning. Thirty-three volunteers described visually animated scenes using naming formats varying in syntactic complexity: from simple words (‘W’, e.g., “triangle”, “red”, “square”, “green”, “to fly towards”), to noun phrases (‘NP’, e.g., “the red triangle”, “the green square”, “to fly towards”), to a sentence (‘S’, e.g., “The red triangle flies towards the green square.”). Behaviourally, we observed an increase in errors and corrections with increasing syntactic complexity, indicating a successful experimental manipulation. In the ERPs following scene onset, syntactic complexity variations were found in a P300-like component (‘S’/‘NP’>‘W’) and a fronto-central negativity (linear increase with syntactic complexity). In addition, the scene could display two actions - unpredictable for the participant, as the disambiguation occurred only later in the animation. Time-locked to the moment of visual disambiguation of the action and thus the verb, we observed another P300 component (‘S’>‘NP’/‘W’). The data show for the first time evidence of sensitivity to syntactic planning within the P300 time window, time-locked to visual events critical of syntactic planning. We discuss the findings in the light of current syntactic planning views.
Highlights
Language is an important basis for communications with others
We have examined the temporal aspects of syntactic encoding in sentence production
We found three components showing a modulation with syntactic complexity: following scene onset an anterior P3 scene effect and a fronto-central negativity were observed, and following the ‘bump’ event another, more posterior, P3 effect (300–500 ms after verb availability; ‘S’.‘noun phrase level syntax (NP)’/‘W’)
Summary
We are constantly constructing streams of thoughts and planning messages to transfer these thoughts into the outside world. We receive acoustic, visual and contextual information, and integrate this into a meaningful message. Whereas speech production and comprehension (or encoding and decoding) have been separate fields in psycholinguistics, recent discussions argue that they are interwoven, non-isolated processes, that largely share underlying mechanisms (see e.g., [1,2]). A lot is already known about online syntactic processing during comprehension based on electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), comparably less is known for the production analogue. A balanced knowledge is necessary to investigate potential commonalities of syntactic processing in both modalities. The current study focuses on syntactic planning during production and addresses the question when in time syntactic planning for speaking takes place
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