Effects of Type of Agreement Violation and Utterance Position on the Auditory Processing of Subject-Verb Agreement: An ERP Study

Abstract

Previous ERP studies have often reported two ERP components—LAN and P600—in response to subject-verb (S-V) agreement violations (e.g., the boys *runs). However, the latency, amplitude and scalp distribution of these components have been shown to vary depending on various experiment-related factors. One factor that has not received attention is the extent to which the relative perceptual salience related to either the utterance position (verbal inflection in utterance-medial vs. utterance-final contexts) or the type of agreement violation (errors of omission vs. errors of commission) may influence the auditory processing of S-V agreement. The lack of reports on these effects in ERP studies may be due to the fact that most studies have used the visual modality, which does not reveal acoustic information. To address this gap, we used ERPs to measure the brain activity of Australian English-speaking adults while they listened to sentences in which the S-V agreement differed by type of agreement violation and utterance position. We observed early negative and positive clusters (AN/P600 effects) for the overall grammaticality effect. Further analysis revealed that the mean amplitude and distribution of the P600 effect was only significant in contexts where the S-V agreement violation occurred utterance-finally, regardless of type of agreement violation. The mean amplitude and distribution of the negativity did not differ significantly across types of agreement violation and utterance position. These findings suggest that the increased perceptual salience of the violation in utterance final position (due to phrase-final lengthening) influenced how S-V agreement violations were processed during sentence comprehension. Implications for the functional interpretation of language-related ERPs and experimental design are discussed.

Behavioral and Neural Correlates of Cognitive-Motor Interference during Multitasking in Young and Old Adults

“…In accordance with Dube et al [53], we demarcated nine ROIs (anterior midline (Fz, FCz), central midline (Cz), posterior midline (Pz, POz), anterior left (F7, F5, F3, FT7, FC5, and FC3), central left (C3, C5, T7, CP3, CP5, and TP7), posterior left (P7, P5, P3, PO7, PO5, and PO3), anterior right (F4, F6, F8, FC4, FC6, and FT8), central right (C4, C6, T8, CP4, CP6, and TP8), and posterior right (P8, P4, P6, PO4, PO6, and PO8)) (Figure 3). Unlike Dube et al [53], CPz was used as a reference electrode in our analysis, and therefore, this electrode was not included in the central midline ROI. In accordance with Beurskens et al [44], all additional midline analyses included Fz, Cz, and Pz.…”

The Role of Frequency in Learning Morphophonological Alternations: Implications for Children With Specific Language Impairment

“…For example, Sundara, Demuth, and Kuhl (2011) have shown that it is easier for infants to perceive third person singular -s utterance finally (where it is longer in duration) than utterance medially (where it is much shorter). This has recently been replicated in an article by Dube, Kung, Peter, Brock, and Demuth (2016) with adults in a sentenceprocessing task using electroencephalograms. In other studies using an intermodal preferential looking paradigm, Davies, Xu Rattanasone, and Demuth (2017a) have shown that 2-year-old children are more sensitive to plural /s/ compared with plural /z/ allomorphs (as in cats vs. dogs).…”

Ki(ng) in the north: Effects of duration, boundary, and pause on post-nasal [ɡ]-presence

“…For psycholinguistic evidence of the salience of utterance-final position, see Sundara, Demuth, and Kuhl (2011) (visual-fixation task) andDube, Kung, Peter, Brock, and Demuth (2016) (EEG experiment).…”