When syntactic errors go unnoticed: An fMRI study of the effect of semantics on syntax

Abstract

In our day to day conversations there are often times when we fail to notice syntactic errors. but why? In this study we conducted both a behavioral and an fMRI study to address this question. The results showed that participants were more likely to fail to detect a morphosyntactic violation if the sentence constituents were semantically related to each other than if they were unrelated. In addition, the related anomalous sentences elicited stronger activation of the left inferior frontal gyrus. Three separate clusters of activation were observed encompassing BA 44, Ba 45/46 and one at the junction of the inferior frontal and precentral sulci. While previous work has demonstrated that semantics information such as plausibility and world knowledge does not have a significant impact on comprehension, it does affect anomaly detection. one theory of language processing that fit the results is "good enough" theory which suggests that we fail to generate a complete representation of the input, particularly when the input describes plausible and/or familiar events.