Investigating the degree of automaticity in syntactic processing in Persian: Evidence from electroencephalographic

Language is a cognitive ability that has a creative and generative system called syntax. Syntax is of special importance in language due to the infinite production of sentences, and it is thought that human beings produce and understand sentences automatically and without awarness. Due to the importance of this issue, the present study investigates the degree of autamaticity of syntactic processing in Persian. For this purpose, event-related potentials (ERP) were recorded by electroencephalography, which has a time resolution of one millisecond. This research was performed by conducting an experiment at the National Brain Mapping Laboratory of Iran and with the financial support of the Cognitive Science and Technology Council on Persian speaking speakers. In this expriment, using the paradigm of attentional blink in a language processing task in the form of short and limited syntactic contexes, we examine the degree of automaticity of processing these contexes by ERP registration with 22 volunteers (10 women and 12 men, with an average age of 23.8 years). The obtained signals were analyzed using EEGlab software in MATLAB program. The test results showed that syntactic processing is not an automated process but a mentally controlled process and is performed in a completely conscious manner.