Sentence processing in 30-month-old children: an event-related potential study.

In a previous event-related brain potential study, we provided evidence that preschoolers display different brain electrical patterns to semantic content and syntactic structure processing. In the present study, we aimed to determine the time-course of these event-related potential effects in 30-month-old children, using the same syntactically anomalous, semantically anomalous and control sentences that we used in our previous study. The results show that semantic violations elicit a frontal negativity peaking around 600 ms, whereas the morphosyntactic violations elicit a slow positive shift peaking around 800 ms with a frontocentral distribution.