Syntactic Constructions Drive Cortical Tracking in the Absence of Lexical Content: An Electrophysiological Investigation of Sentence Processing During Reading

It has been suggested that the synchronization of neural oscillations to syntactic units, such as phrases or clauses, is dependent on lexically-derived projections of syntactic structure. This assertion is based on recent evidence that participants are unable to effectively track syntax when listening to jabberwocky sentences, in which content words are replaced with pseudowords thereby eliminating lexically-derived syntactic projections (Coopmans et al., 2022; Kaufeld et al., 2020). In the present study, we extend the findings from these two studies and present evidence that participants can in fact track syntactic units in jabberwocky sentences when the stimuli are presented visually - a methodological difference that allows participants to easily parse individual words in the sentence. We interpret this finding as indicating that tracking the phrase structure of a sentence can take place in the absence of content words and does not crucially depend on their lexical projections.