TY  - INPR
U1  - Preprint
A1  - Tavano, Alessandro
A1  - Blohm, Stefan
A1  - Knoop, Christine A.
A1  - Muralikrishnan, R
A1  - Fink, Lauren
A1  - Scharinger, Mathias
A1  - Wagner, Valentin
A1  - Thiele, Dominik
A1  - Ghitza, Oded
A1  - Ding, Nai
A1  - Menninghaus, Winfried
A1  - Poeppel, David
T1  - Neural harmonics reflect grammaticality
N2  - Can neural activity reveal syntactic structure building processes and their violations? To verify this, we recorded electroencephalographic and behavioral data as participants discriminated concatenated isochronous sentence chains containing only grammatical sentences (regular trials) from those containing ungrammatical sentences (irregular trials). We found that the repetition of abstract syntactic categories generates a harmonic structure of their period independently of stimulus rate, thereby separating endogenous from exogenous neural rhythms. Behavioral analyses confirmed this dissociation. Internal neural harmonics extracted from regular trials predicted participants’ grammatical sensitivity better than harmonics extracted from irregular trials, suggesting a direct reflection of grammatical sensitivity. Instead, entraining to external stimulus rate scaled with task sensitivity only when extracted from irregular trials, reflecting attention-capture processing. Neural harmonics to repeated syntactic categories constitute the first behaviorally relevant, purely internal index of syntactic competence.
KW  - Syntax
KW  - Grammatikalität
KW  - Studie
KW  - Frequenz
KW  - Harmonik
KW  - Hirnfunktion
Y1  - 2022
UN  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:bsz:mh39-125791
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.08.031575
DO  - https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.08.031575
SP  - 36
S1  - 36
PB  - bioRxiv
ER  -