The processing of number and gender agreement in Spanish: An event-related potential investigation of the effects of structural distance

Bañón, José Alemán; Fiorentino, Robert; Gabriele, Alison

doi:10.1016/j.brainres.2012.03.057

Cited by 55 publications

(99 citation statements)

References 69 publications

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“…ungrammatical: "John run"; for a review see Molinaro, Barber, & Carreiras, 2011). The most robust finding across previous studies that examined agreement processing in different languages is that agreement violations commonly elicit an increased posterior positivity starting at around 500ms after stimulus onset known as the P600 (Alemán Bañón et al, 2012;Coulson, King, & Kutas, 1998;Hagoort & Brown, 2000;Kolk, Chwilla, van Herten, & Oor, 2003;Münte, Szentkuti, Wieringa, Matzke, & Johannes, 1997;Nevins et al, 2007;Osterhout & Mobley, 1995;Silva-Pereyra & Carreiras, 2007). This positivity is sometimes found to be preceded by an increased negativity between 300-500 ms after stimulus onset.…”

Section: Erp Components Implicated In Agreement Processingmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…Previous research has looked at different languages to examine and compare how the brain processes agreement that (i) involves different features, including number (De Vincenzi et al, 2003;Hagoort, Brown, & Groothusen, 1993;Kutas & Hillyard, 1983), gender (Barber & Carreiras, 2005;Hagoort & Brown, 1999), person (FrenckMestre, Osterhout, McLaughlin, & Foucart, 2008;Hinojosa, Martín-Loeches, Casado, Muñoz, & Rubia, 2003) as well as comparisons across features (Alemán Bañón, Fiorentino, & Gabriele, 2012;Alemán Bañón & Rothman, 2016;Barber & Carreiras, 2003, 2005Hagoort, 2003;Mancini, Molinaro, Rizzi, & Carreiras, 2011;Martín-Loeches, Nigbur, Casado, Hohlfeld, & Sommer, 2006;Nevins, Dillon, Malhotra, & Phillips, 2007;Silva-Pereyra & Carreiras, 2007;Zawiszewski, Santesteban, & Laka, 2016) and (ii) occurs between different constituents (Barber & Carreiras, 2005;Díaz, Sebastián-Gallés, Erdocia, Mueller, & Laka, 2011;Zawiszewski & Friederici, 2009).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Effects of subject-case marking on agreement processing: ERP evidence from Basque

Chow

Nevins

Carreiras

2018

Cortex

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Previous cross-linguistic research has found that comprehenders are immediately sensitive to various kinds of agreement violations across languages. We focused on Basque, a verb-final ergative language with both subject-verb (S-V) and object-verb (O-V) agreement. We compared the effects of S-V agreement violations on comprehenders' event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in transitive sentences (where O-V agreement is present, and the subject is ergative) and intransitive sentences (where O-V agreement is absent, and the subject is absolutive). We observed a P600 effect in both cases, but only violations with intransitive subjects elicited an early posterior negativity. Such a qualitative difference suggests that distinct neurocognitive mechanisms are involved in processing agreement with transitive subjects (which are marked with ergative case) vs. intransitive subjects (which bear absolutive case). Building on theoretical proposals that in languages such as Basque, true agreement occurs with absolutive subjects but not with ergative subjects, we submit that the early posterior negativity may be an electrophysiological signature for true agreement.

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Section: Erp Components Implicated In Agreement Processingmentioning

confidence: 96%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of subject-case marking on agreement processing: ERP evidence from Basque

Chow

Nevins

Carreiras

2018

Cortex

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“…i Previous studies have examined how different features are retrieved and tracked online for the purposes of agreement (e.g. Alemán Bañón, Fiorentino, & Gabriele, 2012;Barber & Carreiras, 2005;Colé & Seguí, 1994;Faussart, Jakubowitz, & Costes, 1999;De Vincenzi, 1999;De Vincenzi & Di Domenico, 1999;Lukatela, Kostic, Todorovic, Carello, & Turvey, 1987;Mancini, Molinaro, Rizzi, & Carreiras, 2011;Nevins, Dillon, Malhotra, & Phillips, 2007;Osterhout & Mobley, 1995;Silva-Pereyra & Carreiras, 2007;Zawiszewski, Santesteban, & Laka, 2015). However, relatively little is known about how markedness impacts these agreement relations.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As Molinaro, Barber, and Carreiras (2011) point out in their review of ERP studies on agreement, most previous studies have collapsed across "marked trigger + unmarked target" and errors of the kind "unmarked trigger + marked target" (e.g. Alemán Bañón et al, 2012;Guajardo & Wicha, 2014;Hagoort & Brown, 1999) or by focusing on just one type of error (e.g. Alemán Bañón et al, 2012;Barber & Carreiras, 2005;Deutsch & Bentin, 2001, for number).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Alemán Bañón et al, 2012;Guajardo & Wicha, 2014;Hagoort & Brown, 1999) or by focusing on just one type of error (e.g. Alemán Bañón et al, 2012;Barber & Carreiras, 2005;Deutsch & Bentin, 2001, for number). In fact, Molinaro et al (2011) highlight the need to bring electrophysiological evidence to bear on the question of how feature value asymmetries impact processing at the brain level, a gap in the literature that the present study addresses.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The role of morphological markedness in the processing of number and gender agreement in Spanish: an event-related potential investigation

Bañón

Rothman

2016

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

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Current morphological theory assumes that feature values, such as masculine and feminine or singular and plural, are asymmetrically represented. That is, one member of the opposition (e.g. feminine for gender, plural for number) is assumed to be marked, and the other one, unmarked. The present study examines how these asymmetries impact agreement resolution in Spanish. Agreement was manipulated between a noun acting as head of a relative clause and an adjective located inside the relative clause (e.g. catedral que parecía inmensa "cathedral that looked huge"). Half of the nouns were feminine (marked) and the other half, masculine (unmarked). Half of the nouns were used in the plural (marked) and the other half, in the singular (unmarked). Twenty-seven Spanish native speakers read 240 sentences while their brain activity was recorded with EEG and performed a grammaticality judgment. Results showed that both number and gender violations elicited a central-posterior P600, a component associated with syntactic repair, and a late anterior negativity, argued to reflect working memory costs. Only the P600 was affected by markedness. It started earlier for violations where the mismatching feature was marked. Moreover, it was larger for errors where the mismatching feature was marked, although this amplitude modulation only emerged for number, possibly due to differences in how number and gender cues were realized (i.e. both masculine and feminine showed overt inflection, but singular was uninflected relative to plural). These results suggest that the parser is sensitive to markedness asymmetries in the course of online processing.

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Generative Approaches to Spanish Second Language Acquisition

Rothman¹,

Cabo²

2013

The Handbook of Spanish Second Language Acquisition

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The processing of number and gender agreement in Spanish: An event-related potential investigation of the effects of structural distance

Cited by 55 publications

References 69 publications

Effects of subject-case marking on agreement processing: ERP evidence from Basque

Effects of subject-case marking on agreement processing: ERP evidence from Basque

The role of morphological markedness in the processing of number and gender agreement in Spanish: an event-related potential investigation

Generative Approaches to Spanish Second Language Acquisition

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