Different word order evokes different syntactic processing in Korean language processing by ERP study

Abstract

The goal of the present study is to investigate the Korean language processing by the event-related potentials (ERPs) during the congruent and incongruent conditions with semantic, syntactic and combined. The stimuli were presented visually, 180 of the sentences ended with an expected word (congruent condition), 60 with semantic condition, 60 with syntactic condition and 60 with combined condition to 15 participants. The semantically incongruent condition has shown the N400, which was distributed in right fronto-central region, to the previous semantic studies administered with Indo-European (IE) languages. In syntactically incongruent condition, the P600 is followed by N400 component but no early left anterior negativity (ELAN) was detected which was caused by the structure difference. Doubly incongruent sentences evoked N400 and P600 components with faster latency and higher amplitude than syntactic conditions. The differences suggest that the syntactic integration is affected by the semantic processing, however, the semantic structure is independent of syntactic context in the absence of semantic anomalies.