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Abstract

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded during spoken language comprehension to study the on-line effects of gender agreement violations in controlled infinitival complements. Spanish sentences were constructed in which the complement clause contained a predicate adjective marked for syntactic gender. By manipulating the gender of the antecedent (i.e., the controller) of the implicit subject while holding constant the gender of the adjective, pairs of grammatical and ungrammatical sentences were created. The detection of such a gender agreement violation would indicate that the parser had established the coreference relation between the null subject and its antecedent. The results showed a complex biphasic ERP (i.e., an early negativity with prominence at anterior and central sites, followed by a centroparietal positivity) in the violating condition as compared to the non-violating conditions. The brain reacts to NP-adjective gender agreement violations within a few hundred milliseconds of their occurrence. The data imply that the parser has properly coindexed the null subject of an infinitive clause with its antecedent.

The influence of information status on pronoun resolution in Mandarin Chinese: evidence from ERPs

“…The failure to observe any clear negative modulations in the early time window (200–300 ms) is inconsistent with previous studies concerning referential processing in Romance languages (e.g., Spanish, Dutch; Demestre et al, 1999 ; Lamers et al, 2006 , 2008 ) in which the morphological incongruence (e.g., syntactic gender, case) between pronoun/null pronoun and the antecedent regularly generated early negativities, reflecting the initial establishment of a co-referential relation based mainly on morpho-syntactic rules (e.g., gender and number agreement). However, this is consistent with a number of previous studies concerning pronoun resolution in Chinese ( Xu et al, 2013 ; Xu and Zhou, under revision) and English ( Osterhout and Mobley, 1995 ; Osterhout et al, 1997 ) in which only a monophasic positivity was found.…”

“…In the bonding stage, candidate antecedents are retrieved, whereas in resolution stage, the appropriate antecedent is integrated with the pronoun and the whole discourse. The bonding stage is not consistently reflected in ERP components, although some early negative deflections (e.g., LAN) have been reported in studies concerning morphologically rich languages ( Demestre et al, 1999 ; Lamers et al, 2006 , 2008 ). We did not observe clear early negativities across experiments, even though some early positive responses were observed in posterior electrodes in a context where only one animate antecedent was present (Experiment 1).…”

“…These two processing stages are associated with different ERP components. The bonding stage has been revealed to be related with some early manifestations (e.g., early negativities) in languages with morpho-syntactic agreement features ( Demestre et al, 1999 ; Lamers et al, 2006 , 2008 ), although the early modulation was not consistently observed in languages lacking such an agreement system ( Qiu et al, 2012 ; Xu et al, 2013 ). Nonetheless, compared to the inconsistent findings in bonding processing, resolution processing is generally manifested by a late positivity (P600) regardless of cross-linguistic variations ( Osterhout and Mobley, 1995 ; Lamers et al, 2006 , 2008 ; Qiu et al, 2012 ; Silva-Pereyra et al, 2012 ), reflecting the process of integrating the referential relation with the discourse context.…”

The role of morphological markedness in the processing of number and gender agreement in Spanish: an event-related potential investigation

“…Barber & Carreiras, 2005;Guajardo & Wicha, 2014;Wicha et al, 2004). The finding that agreement violations yielded a P600 is consistent with an extensive body of ERP studies on the online processing of agreement in Spanish (Alemán Bañón et al, 2012;Barber & Carreiras, 2005;Bond, Gabriele, Fiorentino, & Alemán Bañón, 2011;Demestre, Meltzer, García-Albea, & Vigil, 1999;Guajardo & Wicha, 2014;Martín-Loeches, Nigbur, Casado, Hohlfeld, & Sommer, 2006;O'Rourke & Van Petten, 2011;Wicha et al, 2004; but see Martin, Nieuwland, & Carreiras, 2012) and other languages (Deutsch & Bentin, 2001;Hagoort, 2003;Nevins et al, 2007;Osterhout & Mobley, 1995). Although there is accumulating evidence that the P600 does not reflect exclusively linguistic processes, it is reliably found for morphosyntactic violations across languages, modalities, and tasks, and some authors have argued that it indexes processes of syntactic reanalysis and repair (e.g.…”

Processing adjunct control: Evidence on the use of structural information and prediction in reference resolution

“…Studies on complement control (e.g. Boland, Tanenhaus & Garnsey 1990; Demestre et al 1999) have generally found that the anaphor can be processed quickly. But complement control differs from both adjunct control and pronominal anaphora in an important way: the matrix verb gives early cues that a control structure is coming as well as about what the referent of the null subject will be.…”