An ERP study of the ungrammaticality P600 effect elicited by nominative NP in NAGARA clause

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to (1) measure event-related potential (ERP) obtained when a sentence including a non-contradictory reading Nagara clause with a non-grammatical nominative noun phrase (NP) is used as a stimulus and (2) investigate the implications of the measured ERP on the distribution restriction of the nominative NP in the Nagara clause. Since the P600 component, which is said to cause a syntactic deviation, appeared in the results of the experimentations, the analysis that the distribution restriction of nominative NP in a non-contradictory Nagara clause is a syntactic restriction is supported. However, the P600 component appeared only in the group in which the corresponding grammatical Nagara clause sentences were shown as stimulus sentences and not in the group in which the corresponding grammatical stimulus sentence was not presented. Regarding the amount of potential, only the corresponding stimulus sentences could obtain a significant difference. From these results, it was confirmed that cases presenting grammatical pairs of stimulus sentences were more likely to grasp syntactic deviations of non-grammatical stimulus sentences, and that the P600 effect could be obtained positively.