Distinct patterns of neural modulation during the processing of conceptual and syntactic anomalies

Abstract

& The aim of this study was to gain further insights into how the brain distinguishes between meaning and syntax during language comprehension. Participants read and made plausi-bility judgments on sentences that were plausible, morpho-syntactically anomalous, or pragmatically anomalous. In an event-related potential (ERP) experiment, morphosyntactic and pragmatic violations elicited significant P600 and N400 effects, respectively, replicating previous ERP studies that have established qualitative differences in processing conceptually and syntactic anomalies. Our main focus was a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study in which the same subjects read the same sentences presented in the same pseudorandomized sequence while performing the same task as in the ERP experiment. Rapid-presentation event-relate