Being a Participant Matters: Event-Related Potentials Show That Markedness Modulates Person Agreement in Spanish

Abstract

The present study uses event-related potentials to examine subject–verb person agreement in Spanish, with a focus on how markedness with respect to the speech participant status of the subject modulates processing. Morphological theory proposes a markedness distinction between first and second person, on the one hand, and third person on the other. The claim is that both the first and second persons are participants in the speech act, since they play the speaker and addressee roles, respectively. In contrast, third person refers to whomever is neither the speaker nor the addressee (i.e., it is unmarked for person). We manipulated speech participant by probing person agreement with both first-person singular subjects (e.g., yo…lloro “I…cry- 1ST PERSON-SG ”) and third-person singular ones (e.g., la viuda…llora “the widow…cry- 3RD PERSON-SG ”). We also manipulated agreement by crossing first-person singular subjects with third-person singular verbs (e.g., yo… ∗ llora “I…cry- 3RD PERSON-SG ”) and vice versa (e.g., la viuda… ∗ lloro “the widow…cry- 1ST PERSON-SG ”). Results from 28 native speakers of Spanish revealed robust positivities for both types of person violations, relative to their grammatical counterparts between 500 and 1000 ms, an effect that shows a central-posterior distribution, with a right hemisphere bias. This positivity is consistent with the P600, a component associated with a number of morphosyntactic operations (and reanalysis processes more generally). No negativities emerged before the P600 (between 250 and 450 ms), although both error types yielded an anterior negativity in the P600 time window, an effect that has been argued to reflect the memory costs associated with keeping the errors in working memory to provide a sentence-final judgment. Crucially, person violations with a marked subject (e.g., yo… ∗ llora “I…cry- 3RD PERSON-SG ”) yielded a larger P600 than the opposite error type between 700 and 900 ms. This effect is consistent with the possibility that, upon encountering a subject with marked features, feature activation allows the parser to generate a stronger prediction regarding the upcoming verb. The larger P600 for person violations with a marked subject might index the reanalysis process that the parser initiates when there is a conflict between a highly expected verbal form (i.e., more so than in the conditions with an unmarked subject) and the form that is actually encountered.

Examining the Contribution of Markedness to the L2 Processing of Spanish Person Agreement

“…Spanish controls (Alemán Bañón & Rothman, 2019), the speech participant status of the subject (i.e., speaker vs. the default person) did not ease agreement resolution among learners.…”

“…If so, L2ers should elicit larger ERP responses to "first-person subject + third-person verb" errors (similar to the Spanish native speakers in Alemán Bañón and Rothman, 2019) due to the fact that feature activation at the subject (i.e., the first element in the dependency) should facilitate agreement at the verb (e.g., López Prego, 2015;Nevins et al, 2007).…”

“…First, we submitted the sentences with lexical DP subjects, truncated at the adverb a menudo, to a cloze probability rating (e.g., la artista a menudo…) to rule out the possibility that participants could predict the target verbs based on the lexical features of the subjects. This rating, which involved 33 Spanish native speakers who did not participate in the ERP study reported in Alemán Bañón and Rothman (2019), revealed that mean cloze probability was very low (mean cloze: .03; SD: .1), suggesting that the target verbs were, overall, not predictable. In addition, we added 80 fillers using other (nominative case) personal pronouns in coordinated structures with ellipsis (see Table 1).…”

“…In total, participants saw 480 sentences across the two sessions. All materials associated with this study are published in Alemán Bañón and Rothman (2019). All materials from the study on number/gender agreement are published in Alemán Bañón and Rothman (2016).…”

Going Native? Yes, If Allowed by Cross-Linguistic Similarity

“…Regarding (a) a lack of negativity in non-natives has been often reported in the literature ( Hagoort et al, 1993 ; Osterhout et al, 1996 ; Münte et al, 1997 ; Hagoort and Brown, 2000 ; Alemán-Bañón and Rothman, 2019 ; i.a .). According to Hahne (2001) smaller or absent negativity in non-native speakers when detecting ungrammaticality may be due to a reduced degree of automaticity in the activation of processing resources.…”