Jabberwocky sentence
In the poem, Carroll uses correct English grammar and syntax, but many of the words are made up and merely suggest meaning.
Jabberwocky sentences are of interest in the field of neurolinguistics, because they allow for the study of syntactic processing in the absence of semantic content.
A study by Hahne and Jescheniak (2001) demonstrated that test subjects presented with blocks of Jabberwocky sentence trials and blocks of regular sentence trials at least one week apart demonstrated an early left anterior negativity or N150 in the event-related potential recording upon encountering a phrase structure violation in either type of sentence.
[1] A second study by Silva-Pereyra et al. showed that preschoolers at the age of 36 months demonstrate similar processing patterns compared to adults when processing normal sentences with phrase structure violations, showing ERP activity analogous to the N150 and P600 in adults, but shifted later in time.
When presented with phrase-structure violations in Jabberwocky sentences, however, preschoolers demonstrate activity analogous to a N400, typically associated with the extraction of meaning from words in adults, along with a diminished P600.
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.