In a cognitive experiment using EEG to monitor brain activity during natural language comprehension, what distinguishes the brain's response to garden path sentences compared to syntactically unambiguous sentences?

💡 Explanation

Garden path sentences initially suggest an incorrect interpretation, triggering increased processing to resolve the ambiguity. This causes a larger N400 response, reflecting semantic integration difficulty, because the brain has to reanalyze the sentence structure. Therefore, increased N400 amplitude is observed, rather than just changes in oscillatory activity, which are more generally related to attention and cognitive load.

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