Differential Task Effects on N400 and P600 Elicited by Semantic and Syntactic Violations

Syntactic violations in sentences elicit a P600 component in the event-related potential, which is frequently interpreted as signaling reanalysis or repair of the sentence structure. However, P600 components have been reported also for semantic and combined semantic and syntactic violations, giving rise to still other interpretations. In many of these studies, the violation might be of special significance for the task of the participants; however there is a lack of studies directly targeting task effects on the P600. Here we repeated a previously published study but using a probe verification task, focusing on individual words rather than on sentence correctness and directly compared the results with the previous ones. Although a (somewhat smaller) N400 component occurred also in the present study, we did not observe a parietal P600 component. Instead, we found a late anterior negativity. Possibly, the parietal P600 observed in sentence acceptability paradigms relates to the target value of the violations or to late sentence structure-specific processes that are more task-sensitive than the N400 and which are or not initiated in the probe verification task. In any case the present findings show a strong dependency of P600-eliciting processes from attention to the sentences context whereas the N400 eliciting processes appear relatively robust.