Electrophysiological indices of syntactic processing difficulty

Abstract

Two types of processing difficulty are examined by means of electrical recordings taken from the scalp. One type of difficulty seems to be related to syntactic structural anomalies and another is related with memory load due to syntactic complexity. An experiment dealing with structural difficulty reveals the sensitivity of the parser with the argument status of the elements being processed. Memory constraints come into play when processing complex but structurally sound text strings. A number of experiments in this thesis examine a purported metric of complexity, namely, a left anterior negativity. It is argued that the predictive aspects of the parser is responsible for the complexity metric.