Syntactic analysis precedes semantic analysis during human sentence interpretation
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Peer-reviewed event-related potential evidence indicates that semantic interpretation can proceed during sentence reading even when well-formed syntactic analysis is impossible, directly contradicting strict syntactic precedence.
Two event-related brain potential experiments were conducted to investigate whether there is a functional primacy of syntactic structure building over semantic processes during Chinese sentence reading. In both experiments, we found that semantic interpretation proceeded despite the impossibility of a well-formed syntactic analysis. In Experiment 1, we found an N400 difference between combined syntactic category and semantic violations and single syntactic violations. This finding is inconsistent with earlier German and French studies (e.g., Friederici, Gunter, Hahne, & Mauth, 2004; Friederici