THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGY
language tasks. This line
of work has comple-
mented the patient
findings, suggesting
that syntax is processed
first, separately from
meaning, followed by
a secondary process of
integrating syntax with
meaning.
How do we know this?
A consistent observation
is a short, sharp burst of
negative electrical activity
(or spike) over the frontal
lobe, known as the early
left anterior negativity or ELAN, which occurs within two hundred
milliseconds of encountering a syntactic anomaly, as in the sentence
“The Rough Guide enjoyed I was”. In contrast, a semantic anomaly, as
in “he spread his warm bread with socks” usually elicits a negative wave
of activity over central/parietal regions after 400ms, and is known as
the N400. Finally, there’s a positive, more posterior spike after 600ms,
known as the P600, that tends to follow not only syntactic anomalies
but also perfectly grammatical sentences that surprise us, triggering a
reassessment of our initial interpretation, as in: “After a long battle, the
king was surrounded by attackers on all sides, but still the chess grand-
master was confident of a win.” The P600 reflects the cognitive effort
that’s required to mentally adjust to the surprising context. It seems that
these processes occur in series. If a sentence contains both syntactic and
semantic anomalies, only the ELAN is provoked, suggesting that a breach
of grammar puts the brakes on subsequent decoding of meaning.
The language of thought
Can we think about concepts for which we lack the words? Can we have
words for things that we can’t think about? The formal term for the idea
that language dictates what we can and can’t think about is “linguistic
determinism”, and it’s perhaps most famously expressed in the Sapir-
Whorf hypothesis, named after the linguist Edward Sapir and his
student Benjamin Whorf. The idea can be illustrated by the urban myth
Scalp electrical potential/ELANmicro voltstime/seconds005-50.5 1 1.5The blue line shows the characteristic spike
in negative electrical activity triggered by an
ungrammatical sentence.