Event-related potentials and syntactic anomaly: Evidence of anomaly detection during the perception of continuous speech

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 13 scalp electrodes while subjects listened to sentences containing syntactic ambiguities. Words that were inconsistent with the “preferred” sentence structure elicited a positive-going wave (the P600 effect), similar to that elicited by such words during reading (Osterhout & Holcomb, 1992). These results suggest that (1) ERPs recorded during the comprehension of spoken sentences are sensitive to the syntactic anomaly engendered by disambiguating material following erroneous analysis of a syntactically ambiguous string (the “garden-path” effect), (2) the parsing strategies employed during sentence comprehension are (in some circumstances) constant across modalities, and (3) syntactic analysis of spoken sentences is temporally close to the acoustic input.