Is Beta in Agreement with the Relatives? Investigating the Role of Beta Oscillations During Language Processing

There remains some debate about whether neural beta power dynamics observed during sentence comprehension reflect ongoing syntactic unification operations (beta-syntax hypothesis), or instead reflect maintenance or updating of the sentence-level representation (beta-maintenance hypothesis). This dataset consists of magnetoencephalography (MEG) data recorded from 30 native speakers of Dutch while they read relative clause sentences that were initially ambiguous between a subject- or an object-relative reading. An additional condition included a grammatical violation at the disambiguation point in the relative clause sentences. These three conditions facilitate the direct comparison of the above hypotheses. The beta-maintenance hypothesis predicts a decrease in beta power at the disambiguation point for unexpected (and less preferred) object-relative clause sentences and for grammatical violations, as both signal a need to update the sentence-level representation. While the beta-syntax hypothesis also predicts a beta power decrease for grammatical violations due to a disruption of syntactic unification operations, it instead predicts an increase in beta power for the object-relative clause condition because syntactic unification at the point of disambiguation becomes more demanding.

In addition to the raw data, data from each subsequent processing step are included in the collection. All Matlab and other scripts leading to the output at each stage of analysis are also included, along with peripheral information about study design and procedure etc.