Neural responses to structural incongruencies in language and statistical learning point to similar underlying mechanisms

We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the distribution of brain activity while adults performed (a) a natural language reading task and (b) a statistical learning task involving sequenced stimuli. The same positive ERP deflection, the P600 effect, typically linked to difficult or ungrammatical syntactic processing, was found for structural incongruencies in both natural language as well as statistical learning and had similar topographical distributions. These results suggest that general learning abilities related to the processing of complex, sequenced material may be implicated in language processing. We conclude that the same neural mechanisms are recruited for both syntactic processing of language stimuli and statistical learning of sequential patterns more generally.