Mapping sentence form onto meaning: the syntax-semantic interface.

Abstract

The understanding of sentences involves not only the retrieval of the meaning of single words, but the identification of the relation between a verb and its arguments. The way the brain manages to process word meaning and syntactic relations during language comprehension on-line still is a matter of debate. Here we review the different views discussed in the literature and report data from crucial experiments investigating the temporal and neurotopological parameters of different information types encoded in verbs, i.e. word category information, the verb's argument structure information, the verb's selectional restriction and the morphosyntactic information encoded in the verb's inflection. The neurophysiological indices of the processes dealing with these different information types suggest an initial independence of the processing of word category information from other information types as the basis of local phrase structure building, and a later processing stage during which different information types interact. The relative ordering of the subprocesses appears to be universal, whereas the absolute timing of when during later phrases interaction takes places varies as a function of when the relevant information becomes available. Moreover, the neurophysiological indices for non-local dependency relations vary as a function of the morphological richness of the language.