Jabberwocky sentence

Twas brilig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

A Jabberwocky sentence is a type of sentence of interest in neurolinguistics. Jabberwocky sentences take their name from the language of Lewis Carroll's well-known poem "Jabberwocky". In the poem, Carroll uses correct English grammar and syntax, but many of the words are made up and merely suggest meaning. A Jabberwocky sentence is therefore a sentence which uses correct grammar and syntax but contains nonsense words, rendering it semantically meaningless.

Interest in neurolinguistics

Jabberwocky sentences are of interest in the field of neurolinguistics, because they allow for the study of syntactic processing in the absence of semantic content. A study by Hahne and Jescheniak (2001) demonstrated that test subjects presented with blocks of Jabberwocky sentence trials and blocks of regular sentence trials at least one week apart demonstrated an early left anterior negativity or N150 in the event-related potential recording upon encountering a phrase structure violation in either type of sentence. The N150 was followed by a P600, indicating an attempted reinterpretation of the sentence by the brain. While the N150 is expected in the presence of phrase structure violation in normal sentences, in a Jabberwocky sentence, it indicates the processing of morpho-syntactical structure in the absence of lexical semantic content. This implies the existence of a syntactic pattern recognizer, which would interpret word class based on inflectional morphology and word order.[1] A second study by Silva-Pereyra et al. showed that preschoolers at the age of 36 months demonstrate similar processing patterns compared to adults when processing normal sentences with phrase structure violations, showing ERP activity analogous to the N150 and P600 in adults, but shifted later in time. When presented with phrase-structure violations in Jabberwocky sentences, however, preschoolers demonstrate activity analogous to a N400, typically associated with the extraction of meaning from words in adults, along with a diminished P600. This implies that semantics plays a role in syntactic processing in children and provides neurobiological evidence for interactive theories over modular theories of semantic and syntactic processing.[2]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Hahne, Anja; Jescheniak, Jörg D (2001). "What's left if the Jabberwock gets the semantics? An ERP investigation into semantic and syntactic processes during auditory sentence comprehension". Cognitive Brain Research. 11 (2): 199–212. doi:10.1016/S0926-6410(00)00071-9.
  2. ↑ Juan Silva-Pereyra, Barbara T. Conboy, Lindsay Klarman, Patricia K. Kuhl . Grammatical Processing without Semantics? An Event-related Brain Potential Study of Preschoolers using Jabberwocky Sentences" Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Volume 19, Number 6 (June 2007), pp. 1050-1065, http://ejournals.ebsco.com/direct.asp?ArticleID=46509FA4B2C116E917E7
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