Right Hemispheric Syntactic Processing as a Function of Saliency of Syntactic Regularities: an Event-Related Potential Study of Artificial Grammar Learning

• Main Authors: Shiuan-Huey Yen, 顏瑄慧
• Other Authors: Chia-Lin Lee
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2019
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/d4ws53

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 語言學研究所 === 107 === Syntactic processing, as one special characteristic of human language, is strongly lateralized to the left hemisphere (LH). In Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) studies, the right hemisphere (RH) has been found to elicit P600 effect to grammatical errors, showing equivalent syntactic processing ability to the LH. However, the RH P600 effect are often observed in individuals with lower sensitivity to grammatical structure. Under more challenging syntactic processing conditions, the RH might either compete with or attempt to assist the LH. In order to have a better understanding of the interaction between the LH and RH in processing of more complex syntactic regularities, we conducted 2 Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) experiments of young right-handers’ artificial grammar learning. The participants monaurally learned and made grammaticality judgment of a set of 3-item strings generated according to pre-determined artificial grammar rules. In experiment 1, LH-only P600 grammaticality responses are found in successful learners (Hit-False Alarm differences (H-F = 0.91, N = 17), while bilateral P600 effects are found in less successful learners (H-F = 0.06, N = 15). Similar to experiment 1, experiment 2 presented the materials in experiment 1 in 4 sessions and focused only on the successful learners (whose H-F > 0.8 in the last 2 sessions) to have a better look at the brain responses. Experiment 2 further manipulated the conditions as salient (i.e., easier to learn) and less salient (i.e., difficult to learn) regularities. In the salient group (H-F = 0.96, N = 16), LH-only P600 grammaticality responses are observed, yet bilateral P600 effects are observed in the less salient group (H-F = 0.95, N = 16). Results of the two experiments implicate that RH P600 effects of syntactic processing can be compensatory in more challenging learning tasks.