Exploring the Neural Mechanisms Supporting Structured Sequence Processing and Language Using Event-Related Potentials: Some Preliminary Findings

Structured sequence processing (SSP) refers to the neurocognitive mechanisms used to learn sequential patterns in the environment. SSP ability seems to be important for language (Conway, Bauernschmidt, Huang, & Pisoni, 2010); however, there are few neural studies showing an empirical connection between SSP and language. The purpose of this study was to investigate the association between SSP and language processing by comparing the underlying neural components elicited during each type of task. Healthy adult subjects completed a visual, non-linguistic SSP task incorporating an artificial grammar and a visual morphosyntactic language task. Both tasks were designed to cause violations in expectations of items occurring in a series. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to examine the underlying neural mechanisms associated with these expectancy violations. The results indicated the P3a component elicited by the SSP task and the P600 component elicited by the language task shared similarities in their topographic distribution. These preliminary analyses suggest that the P3a and P600 may reflect processes involving detection of sequential violations in non-language and language domains, which is consistent with the idea that language processing relies on general-purpose SSP mechanisms.