Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Structured sequence processing (SSP) refers to theneurocognitive mechanisms used to learn sequential patternsin the environment. SSP ability seems to be important forlanguage (Conway, Bauernschmidt, Huang, & Pisoni, 2010);however, there are few neural studies showing an empiricalconnection between SSP and language. The purpose of thisstudy was to investigate the association between SSP andlanguage processing by comparing the underlying neuralcomponents elicited during each type of task. Healthy adultsubjects completed a visual, non-linguistic SSP taskincorporating an artificial grammar and a visual morpho-syntactic language task. Both tasks were designed to causeviolations in expectations of items occurring in a series.Event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to examine theunderlying neural mechanisms associated with theseexpectancy violations. The results indicated the P3acomponent elicited by the SSP task and the P600 componentelicited by the language task shared similarities in theirtopographic distribution. These preliminary analyses suggestthat the P3a and P600 may reflect processes involvingdetection of sequential violations in non-language andlanguage domains, which is consistent with the idea thatlanguage processing relies on general-purpose SSPmechanisms.