Syntactic and Semantic Factors in Processing Gender Agreement in Hebrew: Evidence from ERPs and Eye Movements

Deutsch, Avital; Bentin, Shlomo

doi:10.1006/jmla.2000.2768

Cited by 151 publications

(158 citation statements)

References 49 publications

(111 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

117

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Word category is formal information that allows the listener to build up the local syntactic structure when hearing or reading a sentence (Frazier, 1987). Gender information, in contrast, is relevant in establishing antecedent relations (e.g., between a pronoun and an antecedent noun) as for example in Spanish, French, Italian, or German (De Vincenzi, 1999), or agreement between different constituents (e.g., subject and verb as for example in Hebrew: Deutsch & Bentin, 2001). Moreover, in the domain of gender information, there is at least a partial overlap between grammatical and natural gender.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Distributed cortical networks for syntax processing: Broca’s area as the common denominator

Heim¹,

Opitz²,

Friederici³

2003

Brain and Language

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Different types of syntactic information (word category, grammatical gender) are processed at different times during word recognition. However, it is an open issue which brain systems support these processes. In the present event-related fMRI study, subjects performed either a syntactic gender decision task on German nouns (GEN), a word category decision task (WC, nouns vs. prepositions), or a physical baseline task (BASE). Reaction times in WC were faster than in GEN, supporting earlier electrophysiological results. Relative to BASE, both syntactic tasks activated the inferior tip of BA 44. In addition, BA 45 showed activation in GEN, whereas BA 47 was activated in WC. The imaging data indicate that the inferior portion of BA 44 together with type-specific prefrontal areas supports both initial word category related and later syntactic processes.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Distributed cortical networks for syntax processing: Broca’s area as the common denominator

Heim¹,

Opitz²,

Friederici³

2003

Brain and Language

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Researchers have used the gender of nouns to investigate word retrieval and word production (e.g., Akhutina, Kurgansky, Polinsky, & Bates, 1999;Bates, Devescovi, Hernandez, & Pizzamiglio, 1996;Bates, Devescovi, Pizzamiglio, Damico, & Hernandez, 1995;Bentrovato, Devescovi, D'Amico, & Bates, 1999;Bentrovato, Devescovi, D'Amico, Wicha, & Bates, 2003;Grosjean, Dommergues, Cornu, & Guillelmon, 1994;Jacobsen, 1999;van Berkum, 1997;Vigliocco & Franck, 1999;Vigliocco, Lauer, Damian, & Levelt, 2002;Vigliocco, Vinson, Indefrey, Levelt, & Hellwig, 2004;Vigliocco & Zilli, 1999), cohort activation in word recognition (e.g., Dahan, Swingley, Tanenhaus, & Magnuson, 2000), processing differences between pictures and words (e.g., Bowers, Vigliocco, Stadthagen-Gonzalez, & Vinson, 1999), the relative timing of syntactic and phonological processes during lexical access (e.g., Schmitt, Rodriguez-Fornells, Kutas, & Munte, 2001a;Schmitt, Schiltz, Zaake, Kutas, & Munte, 2001b;van Turennout, Hagoort, & Brown, 1998) and the interplay between discourse, semantic, and syntactic level processes (e.g., Brown, van Berkum, & Hagoort, 2000;Deutsch & Bentin, 2001;Deutsch, Bentin, & Katz, 1999;Gunter, Friederici, & Schriefers, 2000;Gunter, Stowe, & Mulder, 1997;Hagoort, 2003;van Berkum, Brown, & Hagoort, 1999;Wicha, 2002;Wicha, Bates, Moreno, & Kutas, 2000). Recent studies have also provided electrophysiological evidence for the brain's sensitivity to gender agreement during sentence comprehension (e.g., Brown et al, 2000;Demestre, Meltzer, Garcia-Albea, & Vigil, 1999;Deutsch & Bentin, 2001;…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Recent studies have also provided electrophysiological evidence for the brain's sensitivity to gender agreement during sentence comprehension (e.g., Brown et al, 2000;Demestre, Meltzer, Garcia-Albea, & Vigil, 1999;Deutsch & Bentin, 2001;Gunter et al, 2000;Hagoort, 2003;van Berkum et al, 1999;Wicha, Bates, Moreno, & Kutas, 2003;Wicha, Moreno, & Kutas, 2003;Wicha, Moreno, & Kutas, 2004). Most relevant to the current study are findings from several languages showing that grammatical gender can also contribute to lexical processing, by "priming" the recognition and/or retrieval of an upcoming word and eliciting facilitation (from an agreeing noun or modifier) or inhibition (from a discordant noun or modifier) relative to some baseline.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

When zebras become painted donkeys: Grammatical gender and semantic priming interact during picture integration in a spoken Spanish sentence

Wicha

Orozco-Figueroa

Reyes

et al. 2005

Language and Cognitive Processes

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This study investigates the contribution of grammatical gender to integrating depicted nouns into sentences during on-line comprehension, and whether semantic congruity and gender agreement interact using two tasks: naming and semantic judgement of pictures. Native Spanish speakers comprehended spoken Spanish sentences with an embedded line drawing, which replaced a noun that either made sense or not with the preceding sentence context and either matched or mismatched the gender of the preceding article. In Experiment 1a (picture naming) slower naming times were found for gender mismatching pictures than matches, as well as for semantically incongruous pictures than congruous ones. In addition, the effects of gender agreement and semantic congruity interacted; specifically, pictures that were both semantically incongruous and gender mismatching were named slowest, but not as slow as if adding independent delays from both violations. Compared with a neutral baseline, with pictures embedded in simple command sentences like "Now please say ____", both facilitative and inhibitory effects were observed. Experiment 1b replicated these results with low-cloze gender-neutral sentences, more similar in structure and processing demands to the experimental sentences. In Experiment 2, participants judged a picture's semantic fit within a sentence by button-press; gender agreement and semantic congruity again interacted, with gender agreement having an effect on congruous but not incongruous pictures. Two distinct effects of gender are hypothesised: a "global" predictive effect (observed with and without overt noun production), and a "local" inhibitory effect (observed only with production of gender-discordant nouns).

show abstract

“…Some studies investigating the processing of phrase structure violations, however, found the early anterior negativity more bilaterally distributed [16]. The LAN reflecting morphosyntactic violations usually demonstrates a clear left lateralization [1,4]. The late centro-parietal positivity (P600) has been described in association with a wide range of different syntactic anomalies including those requiring a reanalysis of the preceding structure [13,22,23] and those requiring a repair of a syntactic violation [7,8,14,20,21,24].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The brain knows the difference: two types of grammatical violations

Friederici

Meyer

2004

Brain Research

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The brain has been shown to honor the fundamental linguistic difference between semantic and syntactic information. Here we demonstrate that it even further indicates the necessity to distinguish between two differential syntactic processes: that is to say between the processing of phrase structure information necessary to build up syntactic structures on-line and verb argument structure information crucial to build up representations of who is doing what to whom. The former process is reflected in the event-related brain potentials (ERPs) as an anterior negativity followed by a late centro-parietal positivity, whereas the latter process is reflected as a centro-parietal negativity -positivity pattern. The different ERP patterns clearly suggest that the theoretically assumed difference between local syntactic structure building and argument structure processing is neurophysiologically real. D 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.Theme: Neural basis of behavior Topic: Cognition

show abstract

Syntactic and Semantic Factors in Processing Gender Agreement in Hebrew: Evidence from ERPs and Eye Movements

Cited by 151 publications

References 49 publications

Distributed cortical networks for syntax processing: Broca’s area as the common denominator

Distributed cortical networks for syntax processing: Broca’s area as the common denominator

When zebras become painted donkeys: Grammatical gender and semantic priming interact during picture integration in a spoken Spanish sentence

The brain knows the difference: two types of grammatical violations

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About