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Electrophysiological Response To Omitted Stimulus In Sentence Processing, Hiroko Nakano, Mari-Anne Rosario, Yuriko Oshima-Takane, Lara Pierce, Sophie G. Tate

School of Science Faculty Works

The current study provides evidence that the absence of a syntactically expected item leads to a sustained cognitive processing demand. Event-related potentials were measured at the omission of a syntactically expected object argument in a speech sequence. English monolingual adults listened to paired sentences. The first sentence in the pair established a context. The second sentence provided a response to the first sentence that was either grammatically correct by containing an overt object argument in the form of a pronoun, or was syntactically unacceptable by omitting the expected object pronoun. Event-related potentials measured at the omission of the object argument …