P600 (neuroscience) - Interpretations

Interpretations

There are several theories about what computational processes the P600 may be triggered by. Because it often happens in response to grammatical violations or garden path sentences, one theory is that the P600 reflects processes of revision (i.e., trying to "rescue" the interpretation of a sentence that can't be processed normally because of structural errors) and reanalysis (i.e., trying to rearrange the structure of a sentence that has been interpreted incorrectly because of a garden path). On the other hand, other models suggest that the P600 may not reflect these processes in particular, but just the amount of time and effort in general it takes to build up coherent structure in a sentence, or the general processes of creating or destroying syntactic structure (not specifically because of repair). Another proposal is that the P600 does not necessarily reflect any linguistic processes per se, but is similar to the P300 in that it is triggered when a subject encounters "improbable" stimuli—since ungrammatical sentences are relatively rare in natural speech, a P600 may not be a linguistic response but simply an effect of the subject's "surprise" upon encountering an unexpected stimulus.