The Processing of Grammatical Gender Agreement in Brazilian Portuguese: ERP Evidence in Favor of a Single Route

Abstract

The present study used event-related potentials to investigate whether the processing of grammatical gender agreement involving gender regular and irregular forms recruit the same or distinct neurocognitive mechanisms and whether different grammatical gender agreement conditions elicit the same or diverse ERP signals. Native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese read sentences containing congruent and incongruent grammatical gender agreement between a determiner and a regular or an irregular form (condition 1) and between a regular or an irregular form and an adjective (condition 2). However, in condition 2, trials with incongruent regular forms elicited more positive ongoing waveforms than trial with incongruent irregular forms. We found a biphasic LAN/P600 effect for gender agreement violation involving regular and irregular forms in both conditions. Our findings suggest that gender agreement between determiner and nouns recruits the same neurocognitive mechanisms regardless of the nouns' form and that, depending on the grammatical class of the words involved in gender agreement, differences in ERP signals can emerge.

Research on early grammatical gender processing: what do we know about Spanish-speaking children?

“…They have also found a higher accuracy for transparent vs. opaque nouns, which lead to the conclusion that gender transparency facilitates noun recognition. Similar results were obtained in a study with Portuguese-speaking adults, which revealed that gender errors are more easily detected between a transparent noun and a determiner than between an opaque noun and its determiner (Alencar de Resende, Mota & Seuren, 2018).…”