Structure and limited capacity in verbal working memory: A study with event-related potentials

被引:361
作者
Kolk, HHJ [1 ]
Chwilla, DJ [1 ]
van Herten, M [1 ]
Oor, PJW [1 ]
机构
[1] Univ Nijmegen, Nijmegen Inst Cognit Res & Informat Technol, NL-6500 HE Nijmegen, Netherlands
关键词
working memory; language capacity; ambiguity; parsing; sentence plausibility; P600; N400;
D O I
10.1016/S0093-934X(02)00548-5
中图分类号
R36 [病理学]; R76 [耳鼻咽喉科学];
学科分类号
100104 ; 100213 ;
摘要
In order to test recent claims about the structure of verbal working memory, two ERP experiments with Dutch speaking participants were carried out. We compared the ERP effects of syntactic and semantic mid-sentence anomalies in subject and object relative sentences. In Experiment 1, the participants made acceptability judgments, while in Experiment 2 they read for comprehension. Syntactic anomalies concerned subject-verb disagreement, while semantic anomalies were related to implausible events (e.g., *The cat that fled from the mice ran through the room). Semantic anomalies did not elicit an N400 effect. The semantic as well as syntactic anomalies elicited P600 effects, with similar centro-parietal scalp distributions. For both kinds of anomaly, the P600 effects were modulated by syntactic complexity: they were either relatively small (Experiment 1) or absent (Experiment 2) in object relative sentences. Taken together, our results suggest that: (a) verbal working memory is a limited capacity system; (b) it is not subdivided into an interpretative and a post-interpretative component (Caplan Waters, 1999); (c) the P600 can reflect the presence of a semantic bias in syntactically unambiguous sentences; (d) the P600 is related to language monitoring: its function is to check upon the veridicality of an unexpected (linguistic) event; (e) if such a check is made, there is no integration of the event and hence no N400 effect. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science (USA). All rights reserved.
引用
收藏
页码:1 / 36
页数:36
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