Animacy modulates gender agreement computation in Hindi: An ERP study

Abstract

Gender has been investigated in psycholinguistics research both with respect to how it is retrieved when a noun is encountered and the computation of its agreement dependencies between different elements in a sentence. The literature is abound with differences as to the processing of gender agreement computations across languages and constructs. Similarly, neurophysiological evidence with respect to gender retrieval mechanisms differ wherein languages differ in the way the gender feature is retrieved when a noun is encountered based on different properties. The present study aims to scrutinize gender agreement computations in verb-agreement relations in Hindi and to ascertain if the intrinsic property (i.e. the animacy) of a noun participating in the relation plays a role in processing agreement dependencies. In addition, it also looks into the issue of whether the gender retrieval mechanism in the language influences agreement comprehension. Results revealed a positivity for the animate subject agreement and a negativity for the inanimate subject agreement violations at the position of the verb respectively. The results are suggestive of distinct processing mechanisms underlying semantic and syntactic gender. Further, the results also suggest that gender agreement computation in Hindi is modulated by the way gender is retrieved at the position of the noun.