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Hubers, F., Snijders, T. M., & De Hoop, H. (2016). How the brain processes violations of the grammatical norm: An fMRI study. Brain and Language, 163, 22-31. doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2016.08.006.
Abstract
Native speakers of Dutch do not always adhere to prescriptive grammar rules in their daily speech. These grammatical norm violations can elicit emotional reactions in language purists, mostly high-educated people, who claim that for them these constructions are truly ungrammatical. However, linguists generally assume that grammatical norm violations are in fact truly grammatical, especially when they occur frequently in a language. In an fMRI study we investigated the processing of grammatical norm violations in the brains of language purists, and compared them with truly grammatical and truly ungrammatical sentences. Grammatical norm violations were found to be unique in that their processing resembled not only the processing of truly grammatical sentences (in left medial Superior Frontal Gyrus and Angular Gyrus), but also that of truly ungrammatical sentences (in Inferior Frontal Gyrus), despite what theories of grammar would usually lead us to believe -
Fahrenfort, J. J., Snijders, T. M., Heinen, K., van Gaal, S., & Scholte, H. S. (2012). Neuronal integration in visual cortex elevates face category tuning to conscious face perception. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 109(52), 21504-21509. doi:10.1073/pnas.1207414110.
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Kos, M., Van den Brink, D., Snijders, T. M., Rijpkema, M., Franke, B., Fernandez, G., Hagoort, P., & Whitehouse, A. (2012). CNTNAP2 and language processing in healthy individuals as measured with ERPs. PLoS One, 7(10), e46995. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0046995.
Abstract
The genetic FOXP2-CNTNAP2 pathway has been shown to be involved in the language capacity. We investigated whether a common variant of CNTNAP2 (rs7794745) is relevant for syntactic and semantic processing in the general population by using a visual sentence processing paradigm while recording ERPs in 49 healthy adults. While both AA homozygotes and T-carriers showed a standard N400 effect to semantic anomalies, the response to subject-verb agreement violations differed across genotype groups. T-carriers displayed an anterior negativity preceding the P600 effect, whereas for the AA group only a P600 effect was observed. These results provide another piece of evidence that the neuronal architecture of the human faculty of language is shaped differently by effects that are genetically determined.
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