Electrophysiological indices of syntactic processing difficulty

Two types of processing difficulty are examined by means of electrical recordings taken from the scalp. One type of difficulty seems to be related to syntactic structural anomalies and another is related with memory load due to syntactic complexity. An experiment dealing with structural difficulty reveals the sensitivity of the parser with the argument status of the elements being processed. Memory constraints come into play when processing complex but structurally sound text strings. A number of experiments in this thesis examine a purported metric of complexity, namely, a left anterior negativity. It is argued that the predictive aspects of the parser is responsible for the complexity metric.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

1998

Author dc:creator

• Harris, Anthony R

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Ken Wexler.

• Brain and Cognitive Sciences

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/47655

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/47655