Postersession 2
Poster #: 107
Topic: Speech and language (incl. deficits)
Thursday, Sep 10, 2015
14:30-16:00
1st floor

Early and interactive stored-form (symbol) access and combinatorial (rule) processing in constructing constructions: a MMN study

Guglielmo Lucchese1, Jeff Hanna1, Anne Autenrieb1, Natalie Miller, & Friedemann Pulvermüller1

1Brain Language Lab, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
guglielmo.lucchese@fu-berlin.de

Combinatorial mechanisms and access to stored signs in the brain are indexed by the MMN that can be used for determining their time course and interaction.

We probed 16 mini-constructions that were either well-formed [ich leide (=suffer), ich zeige (=show), wir schweigen (=keep silent), wir scheiden (=separate)]; ill-combined (*ich schweigen, *ich scheiden, *wir leide, *wir zeige); containing a pseudoword (ich schweide*, ich scheige*, wir leigen*, wir zeiden*); or containing a pseudoword and morphosyntactically ill-combined (*ich leigen*, *ich zeiden*, *wir schweide*, *wir scheige*). The Storage and Combination factors were orthogonally varied keeping the critical last syllables constant. Spoken phrases were presented in 2 blocks of a MMN multifeature paradigm with each pronoun as standard stimulus and the 8 verbs as deviants. Data from 23 subjects were analysed with repeated-measures ANOVAs.

The ERPs showed a main effect of Storage [F(1,22)=4.6, p=0.04] 100ms after last syllable onset and an effect of Combination varying across hemispheres [F(1,22)=6.9, p=0.01] at 105ms. Responses emerged at 270ms for both ill-combined and pseudo-verb-containing strings. Double violations failed to elicit a response. This resulted in a significant interaction of the Storage and Combination factors [F(1,22)=6.9, p=0.01].

Construction storage-related and combinatorial processes are indexed very early by different brain signatures resembling, respectively, the lexical and syntactic MMN. At a second stage interactive storage-related and combinatorial processing is evident, possibly reflecting the search for alternatives to incongruent stimuli, which may be aborted in the case of double violations.