The influence of semantic and phonological factors on syntactic decisions: An event‐related brain potential study

Abstract

During language production and comprehension, information about a word's syntactic properties is sometimes needed. While the decision about the grammatical gender of a word requires access to syntactic knowledge, it has also been hypothesized that semantic (i.e., biological gender) or phonological information (i.e., sound regularities) may influence this decision. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were measured while native speakers of German processed written words that were or were not semantically and/or phonologically marked for gender. Behavioral and ERP results showed that participants were faster in making a gender decision when words were semantically and/or phonologically gender marked than when this was not the case, although the phonological effects were less clear. In conclusion, our data provide evidence that even though participants performed a grammatical gender decision, this task can be influenced by semantic and phonological factors.

The effect of phonological realization of inflectional morphology on verbal agreement in French: Evidence from ERPs

“…The effect of phonology on syntactic processing has also recently been investigated in an ERP study of grammatical gender in German (Schiller, Munte, Horemans, & Jansma, 2003). Schiller et al (2003) reported variations in the behavioral data obtained for native speakers, with faster decisions about grammatical gender when either semantic (biological gender) or phonological cues were available. Variations in the ERP response (as indexed by onset and amplitude of the N2OO), however, confirmed only the effect of semantic gender information on accessing syntactic gender information.…”

Access to Lexical Information in Language Comprehension: Semantics before Syntax

“…Although our ERP measures are not immune to strategic influences, they might avoid some effects emerging at later response stages. Schiller, Münte, Horemans, and Jansma (2003) investigated phonological regularities in German gender classes and their influence on gender decisions. Although they found a significant effect for RTs in a simple go/no-go task, the peak latency of the inhibition-related N2 effect showed no reliable difference.…”

The lexical-syntactic representation of number

“…Schiller, Münte, Horemans, and Jansma (2003) showed that gender decisions in German could be influenced by the biological sex (natural gender) of a noun referent. When there was congruency between biological sex and grammatical gender (e.g.…”