Neuropharmacology of language: ERP evidence for catecholaminergic modulation of syntactic processing.

Methylphenidate amplified the P600 ERP effect during sentence comprehension with local syntactic ambiguities in healthy individuals, with the strongest increase in participants with lower working memory capacity.

• Why it matters: Brain catecholamines are implicated in language comprehension, but which cognitive processes they modulate—especially syntactic unification—remains underexplored.
• What they did: Using electroencephalography plus psychopharmacology, the study tested how the catecholaminergic stimulant methylphenidate affects processing of sentences containing local syntactic ambiguities.
• The result: The drug’s impact on semantic processing was subtler, with suggestive attenuation of the N400 effect to ambiguous sentences, and the P600 increase supports catecholamine-linked syntactic unification.