The Research On ERPs Responses To Chinese Garden-path Sentence

Language comprehension is clearly a function of the human brain. Theoretical accounts of some of the most fundamental questions about human language (e.g. the ability of children to acquire language, and the effects of age on language-learning ability) rely explicitly on biological explanations. Compelling tests of these hypotheses necessarily require biological measurement. For these and other reasons, the ideal method should also provide a means for relating the obtained data to brain function. With the development of ERP and fMRI,many researches focus on accurate brain localization during syntactic processing. The purpose of this study is to compare event-related potentials effects during the processing of Chinese garden-path sentences and normal sentences. The aim is to determine whether or not P600 is an electrophysiological marker of garden-path sentence and to demonstrate the relationship between P600 and P300. In this experiment, through observation of ERPs responses to critical word"de"in Chinese garden-path sentences, we conclud that P300 might be another important ERPs component associated with syntactic processing, and P500 (P600-like component) is sensitive to complexity of sentence structure. The exact relationship between P300 and P600 is not clarified yet. Of particular interest is the involvement of frontal area of brain the processing of Chinese garden-path sentence.