The semantic processing of syntactic structure in sentence comprehension: An ERP study

Previous studies have demonstrated that verbs violating selectional constraints of their arguments elicit N400 effects in the event-related potentials (ERPs) in sentence comprehension. The present study examined brain responses to verbs violating semantic constraints specified by syntactic structures (i.e., phrasal constructions), contrasting them with those elicited by lexical–semantic violations between verbs and their arguments. The construction-based semantic violations gave rise to a posterior N400, while the lexical-based semantic violations produced a much stronger N400 with a broader scalp distribution. These findings suggested that the integration of verb meaning with prior sentence context is influenced not only by semantic features of preceding content words with which the verb co-occurs, but also by semantic properties of the syntactic structure in which the verb appears. This study provides online evidence supporting the constructionist approaches to language, which claim that syntactic structures may have their own (abstract) meanings, independent of lexical meanings of their constituent content words.