Stereotypes override grammar: Social knowledge in sentence comprehension

Abstract

Many studies have provided evidence for the automaticity and immediacy with which stereotypical knowledge affects our behavior. However, less is known about how such social knowledge interacts with linguistic cues during comprehension. In this ERP sentence processing study we took advantage of the rich grammatical gender morphology of Spanish to explore the processing of role nouns in which stereotype and grammatical cues were simultaneously manipulated, in a factorial design. We show that stereotypical knowledge overrides syntactic cues, highlighting the immediacy with which stereotype knowledge is activated during language comprehension and supporting proposals claiming that social knowledge impacts on language processing differently from other forms of semantics.

Brain indices of disagreement with one’s social values predict EU referendum voting behavior

“…“If Britain stays in the EU our industry will be stronger” for Leave voters, and “If Britain leaves Europe our quality of life will be reduced” for Remain voters) elicited larger N400 waveforms. This result shares similarities with previous work that showed larger N400s for information that is not congruent with personally relevant moral values ( Van Berkum et al , 2009 ), or stereotypical knowledge ( White et al , 2009 ; Hehman et al , 2014 ; Mu et al , 2015 ; Molinaro et al , 2016 ), and further extends this N400 effect to politically charged information in an electoral context. One view on the N400 is that the waveform reflects the process of semantically integrating the critical word with the preceding context ( Hagoort, 2008 ).…”

“…We first sought to characterize the N400 effect in decided voters (18 Remain and 18 Leave voters). As the N400 is larger for violations of one’s social beliefs ( Van Berkum et al , 2009 ; White et al , 2009 ; Hehman et al , 2014 ; Mu et al , 2015 ; Molinaro et al , 2016 ), we hypothesized that in participants with a definite intention to vote Remain, statements supporting a Leave perspective would elicit larger negativities over posterior scalp locations than statements indicating a Remain perspective, and that an opposite pattern would arise in participants with a definite intention to vote Leave. The mixed-model Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) on the 300–500 latency window with factors Vote Intention (Remainer, Leaver), Statement Type (Remain, Leave), Anterior–Posterior, ROI and Electrode (see Supplementary Figure S1 for a graphic illustration of electrodes used for the analysis, and their arrangement into ROIs) supported this hypothesis.…”

FN400 and LPC Responses to Different Degrees of Sensory Involvement: A Study of Sentence Comprehension

“…For the final words of the sentences, the FN400 and LPC were analyzed. The components' mean amplitudes for the final words followed by the response time window was qualified based on the findings of the previous literature (e.g., Danko et al, 2014;Molinaro et al, 2016;Yang et al, 2014;Volz et al, 2019) as the mean voltage between 300 to 550 ms…”

Frequency and working memory effects in incidental learning of a complex agreement pattern

“…However, obtaining information about how well each of the grammatical category was learned by future research might provide a better understanding about acquisition of complex systems. Finally, exploring how other factors, such as stereotypical gender (Molinaro, Su & Carreiras, 2016;Siyanova-Chanturia, Pesciarelli & Cacciari, 2012) of the stimuli used in the present study, may foster learning of a morphological pattern could be another potential trend of research. Despite its limitations, nevertheless, the advantage of the current research is its contribution to the growing understanding of L2 grammatical acquisition and its use of a natural language system.…”