Processing of temporary syntactic ambiguity in Italian "who"-questions: a study with event-related potentials.

This study investigated the processing of direct Italian "who"-questions, containing a temporary ambiguity of the syntactic role (subject/object) of the initial pronoun. To this aim we measured event-related potentials (ERPs) evoked by the disambiguating verbal agreement word and by the following ones. Results showed two positive deflections, corresponding to a P300 and to a P600, only at the target verb of the object-first extraction, the condition which has been demonstrated to be less preferred by speakers.

Differences in the perception and time course of syntactic and semantic violations.

A reading time and an ERP experiment conducted in Italian investigated the parser's responses to a syntactic violation (subject-verb number agreement) and to a semantic violation (subject-verb selectional restriction), examining the time course of comprehension processes until sentence end. The reading-time data showed that the syntactic violation was detected earlier than the semantic one and that the two violations differed in the time-course. The ERP data fully supported the reading time data: Syntactic anomalies elicited a left anterior negativity (LAN) and a P600.

Cortical brain responses to semantic incongruity and syntactic violation in Italian language: an event-related potential study.

The present experiment investigated cortical responses of native Italian subjects during reading of short sentences including semantic or morphosyntactic violations. Given the specificity of the Italian language in which the sequencing of words is relatively more free than in English or other languages, we investigated whether syntactic and semantic violations were able to elicit event-related potential (ERP) components similar to those found in other languages. Cortical potentials evoked by the anomalous target word were recorded at frontal, central and parietal electrodes.