Where agreement merges with disagreement: fMRI evidence of subject–verb integration

Verbal and nominal agreement: An fMRI study

“…From a neuro-anatomical perspective, a few studies have investigated the effects of agreement on the BOLD signal Hammer et al, 2007;Hernandez et al, 2004;Miceli et al, 2002;Nieuwland et al, 2012;Quiñones et al, 2014). In particular, Carreiras et al (2010) investigated agreement in the processing of word pairs, either determiner-noun or noun-adjective Spanish items.…”

“…While in the former case interpretation leads to associating a linguistic stimulus ("El anillo") to a referent in the external world (a circle-shaped object), interpretation of a subject-verb agreement relation ("Él baila") implies building a richer semantic representation that encompasses not only the identification of entities in the external world, but also their thematic and discourse roles in the dancing event that the agreement relation describes. This could therefore lead to differential patterns of activation that qualitatively and/or quantitatively differ across nominal and subject-verb agreement in areas that have been associated with semantic integration and conceptual processing, such as the anterior temporal cortex and/or the angular gyrus (Binder and Desai, 2011;Binder et al, 2009;Bornkessel-Schlesewsky and Schlesewsky, 2013;Lau et al, 2008;Quiñones et al, 2014).…”

Disentangling meaning in the brain: Left temporal involvement in agreement processing

“…contrasting anomalous and correct stimuli) have suggested that the performance of the mechanisms described above can be sensitive to fine-grained properties of the input, lending support to the hypothesis that form-to-meaning mapping is not a monolithic operation, but a composite process through which the information extracted from the input -nouns and verbs for example -is interfaced with different types of higher-level representations (Mancini et al 2011;Mancini et al 2014) . Such is the case of the person and number features in subject-verb agreement, the violation of which has been found to yield distinct behavioral 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 6 (Mancini et al 2014) and electrophysiological responses (Mancini et al 2011;see Molinaro et al 2011 for a review of agreement studies).…”

“…Specifically, because of its direct link to discourse, person is posited to occupy a higher node in syntactic structure compared to number (Bianchi, 2006;Mancini et al, 2013;Shlonsky, 1989;Sigurdsson, 2004), making it possible to associate each morphological realization of person (1 st , 2 nd or 3 rd ) with a specific participant (speaker, addressee, non-participant) and thus assign a discourse role. In contrast, no such linking to discourse is required for number: the number information extracted from verb is mapped onto the cardinality representation invoked by the subject argument, independently of the discourse role of this argument (see Mancini et al 2013 andMancini et al 2014 for a detailed theoretical explanation of person and number difference in mapping points).…”

“…In this study, we seek to fill this gap by uncovering the neuro-anatomical substrates involved in the construction of agreement dependencies and their interpretation, capitalizing on the distinction between person and number interpretation. To this end, we will examine agreement between subject and verb by creating person and number anomalies as in (1) above, a paradigm that has proved to be effective in highlighting behavioral and electrophysiological differences in the elaboration of different aspects of sentence interpretation (Mancini et al 2014;Mancini et al 2011).…”