Does the ending matter? The role of gender-to-ending consistency in sentence reading

Caffarra, Sendy; Barber, Horacio A.

doi:10.1016/j.brainres.2015.02.018

Cited by 34 publications

(40 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…The author argued that gender was stored as a feature of the lemma in Italian, and that full lexical access was required to retrieve its value during the comprehension of the noun, which is then said to give rise to the N400 observed in that study. Along similar lines, Caffarra and Barber (2015) did not observe an interaction of transparency and agreement in their study, thus concluding that gender retrieval and agreement computation were independent processes. The interaction of agreement and animacy observed in the current experiment suggest that gender retrieval and gender agreement computation are not independent of each other in Hindi.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 53%

“…Simply put, although the parser detects noun-ending cues with respect to gender during processing, this does not affect the computation of agreement. Caffarra and Barber (2015) studied determiner-noun agreement in Spanish in a sentential context to examine if the dual-route mechanism influenced gender agreement computation in the language. The authors manipulated the noun transparency as well as the agreement between the determiner and the noun in the experiment.…”

Section: Neurophysiology Of Gender Retrievalmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Animacy modulates gender agreement computation in Hindi: An ERP study

Bhattamishra

Muralikrishnan

Choudhary

2019

Preprint

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Gender has been investigated in psycholinguistics research both with respect to how it is retrieved when a noun is encountered and the computation of its agreement dependencies between different elements in a sentence. The literature is abound with differences as to the processing of gender agreement computations across languages and constructs. Similarly, neurophysiological evidence with respect to gender retrieval mechanisms differ wherein languages differ in the way the gender feature is retrieved when a noun is encountered based on different properties. The present study aims to scrutinize gender agreement computations in verb-agreement relations in Hindi and to ascertain if the intrinsic property (i.e. the animacy) of a noun participating in the relation plays a role in processing agreement dependencies. In addition, it also looks into the issue of whether the gender retrieval mechanism in the language influences agreement comprehension. Results revealed a positivity for the animate subject agreement and a negativity for the inanimate subject agreement violations at the position of the verb respectively. The results are suggestive of distinct processing mechanisms underlying semantic and syntactic gender. Further, the results also suggest that gender agreement computation in Hindi is modulated by the way gender is retrieved at the position of the noun.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 53%

Section: Neurophysiology Of Gender Retrievalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Animacy modulates gender agreement computation in Hindi: An ERP study

Bhattamishra

Muralikrishnan

Choudhary

2019

Preprint

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“…On the other hand, speakers originally tuned to Spanish process transparent and opaque items more similarly during language preactivation, as a result of the more robust mapping of grammatical gender from lexical information in the Spanish language. Results along these lines have already emerged in experiments with words in isolation (Caffarra et al, 2014) and also in studies investigating the effect of transparency during determinernoun agreement (Caffarra & Barber, 2015). It is also worth noting that the difference in predictive processing between the two groups is very unlikely to be due to a reduced proficiency for Basque natives in Spanish, since in the general proficiency assessment the two groups were fairly balanced in both languages, and also the behavioral results in both tasks did not reveal any significant differences.…”

Section: The Role Of Native Experiencementioning

confidence: 79%

Reanalyzing language expectations: Native language knowledge modulates the sensitivity to intervening cues during anticipatory processing

Giannelli

Molinaro

2018

Psychophysiology

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We investigated how native language experience shapes anticipatory language processing. Two groups of bilinguals (either Spanish or Basque natives) performed a word matching task (WordMT) and a picture matching task (PictureMT). They indicated whether the stimuli they visually perceived matched with the noun they heard. Spanish noun endings were either diagnostic of the gender (transparent) or ambiguous (opaque). ERPs were time-locked to an intervening gender-marked determiner preceding the predicted noun. The determiner always gender agreed with the following noun but could also introduce a mismatching noun, so that it was not fully task diagnostic. Evoked brain activity time-locked to the determiner was considered as reflecting updating/reanalysis of the task-relevant preactivated representation. We focused on the timing of this effect by estimating the comparison between a gender-congruent and a gender-incongruent determiner. In the WordMT, both groups showed a late N400 effect. Crucially, only Basque natives displayed an earlier P200 effect for determiners preceding transparent nouns. In the PictureMT, both groups showed an early P200 effect for determiners preceding opaque nouns. The determiners of transparent nouns triggered a negative effect at ∼430 ms in Spanish natives, but at ∼550 ms in Basque natives. This pattern of results supports a "retracing hypothesis" according to which the neurocognitive system navigates through the intermediate (sublexical and lexical) linguistic representations available from previous processing to evaluate the need of an update in the linguistic expectation concerning a target lexical item.

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“…On the other hand, speakers originally tuned to Spanish process transparent and opaque items equally during prediction, as a result of the more robust mapping of grammatical gender from lexical information in this language. This had already been found to be true not only in experiments with words in isolation (Caffarra et al, 2014), but especially in experiments investigating the effect of transparency during determiner-noun agreement (Caffarra & Barber, 2015).…”

Section: The Role Of Native Experiencementioning

confidence: 72%

“…Spanish natives do not rely on formal cues (i.e. a/o noun ending) to compute agreement dependencies involving grammatical gender (since ~1/3 of the nouns are gender opaque) (Caffarra & Barber, 2015), but rely on the lexical information stored in the mental lexicon to predict the gender of the word that is coming next, without taking into account the noun transparency, as reflected by the N400 effect.…”

Section: Hierarchical Levels Of Representation In Bilingual Predictionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Native experience modulates neural timing: plasticity in language prediction hierarchies

Giannelli

Molinaro²

2018

Preprint

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We investigated how native language experience shapes prediction mechanisms. Two groups of bilinguals (either Spanish or Basque natives) performed a word matching task (WMT) and a picture matching task (PMT). They indicated whether the stimuli they perceived matched with the noun they heard. Spanish noun endings were either diagnostic of the gender (transparent), or ambiguous (opaque). ERPs were time-locked to the gender-marked determiner preceding the predicted noun. In the WMT both groups showed a negative (~340 ms) effect. Basque natives displayed an earlier effect (~150 ms) for determiners preceding transparent nouns. In the PMT both groups showed an early effect (~160 ms) for determiners preceding opaque nouns.Transparent nouns' determiners elicited prediction at ~330 ms in Spanish natives, but at ~460 ms in Basque natives. It is concluded that bilinguals rely on the features of the L1 for predicting in the L2: native experience moulds prediction. Linguistic prediction is hierarchical, with different operation levels communicating at an interface stage.

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Does the ending matter? The role of gender-to-ending consistency in sentence reading

Cited by 34 publications

References 34 publications

Animacy modulates gender agreement computation in Hindi: An ERP study

Animacy modulates gender agreement computation in Hindi: An ERP study

Reanalyzing language expectations: Native language knowledge modulates the sensitivity to intervening cues during anticipatory processing

Native experience modulates neural timing: plasticity in language prediction hierarchies

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