Eliciting ERP Components for Morphosyntactic Agreement Mismatches in Perfectly Grammatical Sentences

Abstract

The present event-related brain potential (ERP) study investigates mechanisms underlying the processing of morphosyntactic information during real-time auditory sentence comprehension in French. Employing an auditory-visual sentence-picture matching paradigm, we investigated two types of anomalies using entirely grammatical auditory stimuli: (i) semantic mismatches between visually presented actions and spoken verbs, and (ii) number mismatches between visually presented agents and corresponding morphosyntactic number markers in the spoken sentences (determiners, pronouns in liaison contexts, and verb-final “inflection”). We varied the type and amount of number cues available in each sentence using two manipulations. First, we manipulated the verb type, by using verbs whose number cue was audible through subject (clitic) pronoun liaison (liaison verbs) as well as verbs whose number cue was audible on the verb ending (consonant-final verbs). Second, we manipulated the pre-verbal context: each sentence was preceded either by a neutral context providing no number cue, or by a subject noun phrase containing a subject number cue on the determiner. Twenty-two French-speaking adults participated in the experiment. While sentence judgment accuracy was high, participants' ERP responses were modulated by the type of mismatch encountered. Lexico-semantic mismatches on the verb elicited the expected N400 and additional negativities. Determiner number mismatches elicited early anterior negativities, N400s and P600s. Verb number mismatches elicited biphasic N400-P600 patterns. However, pronoun + verb liaison mismatches yielded this pattern only in the plural, while consonant-final changes did so in the singular and the plural. Furthermore, an additional sustained frontal negativity was observed in two of the four verb mismatch conditions: plural liaison and singular consonant-final forms. This study highlights the different contributions of number cues in oral language processing and is the first to investigate whether auditory-visual mismatches can elicit errors reminiscent of outright grammatical errors. Our results emphasize that neurocognitive mechanisms underlying number agreement in French are modulated by the type of cue that is used to identify auditory-visual mismatches.

Growing Random Forests reveals that exposure and proficiency best account for individual variability in L2 (and L1) brain potentials for syntax and semantics

“…The absence of a LAN also differs from previous studies (Nichols & Joanisse, 2019;Steinhauer et al, 2009), although some studies focusing on L1-processing have observed an N400, and no LAN, in response to SCVs (Nickels et al, 2014;Zhang et al, 2013). In morphosyntactic studies focusing on agreement, there is currently a debate on whether the LAN is, in fact, an N400 that adopts a frontal, left-lateralized topographic distribution when it is superimposed by a right-posterior P600 (Guajardo & Wicha, 2014; but see discussion in Courteau et al, 2019). Since some LANs have been observed in the absence of a P600 (Hasting & Kotz, 2008), and considering recent studies suggesting that at least some LAN effects are not a product of averaging (Caffarra, Mendoza, & Davidson, 2019), one possibility is that LAN and N400 are not quite distinct but represent a continuum reflecting a mismatch between predicted features and the target, with a topography becoming more N400-like when these features belong to the lexical-semantic domain (Bornkessel-Schlesewsky & Schlesewsky, 2018;Molinaro, Barber, Caffarra, & Carreiras, 2015).…”

Verbing nouns and nouning verbs: Using a balanced design provides ERP evidence against “syntax-first” approaches to sentence processing

“…In the introduction, we reviewed arguments that the LAN and N400 are two extremes on a continuum reflecting similar processes, with a topography that can be modulated depending on the input type [41]. In agreement studies, it has been suggested that N400s index a mismatch between word forms (e.g., is / � are agreement mismatches on irregular verbs which are expressed as stems [40,71]) while the LAN reflects mismatching transparent affixes [41]. Transposing this to syntactic categories, (left-lateralized) anterior negativities may be observed when the cues to syntactic category are more grammatical in nature (i.e., provided by inflectional or derivational morphemes), while word stem cues, as we have in our experiment, could lead to more central negativities.…”

Identifying Linguistic Markers of French-Speaking Teenagers With Developmental Language Disorder: Which Tasks Matter?

“…Thirty-seven French-speaking children and teenagers participated in this study, which is part of a larger research project on neurocognitive processing in DLD 3 (see Courteau et al, 2019). The protocol was approved by the University of Montréal Research Ethics Board for educational and psychology research (CERES-15-070-D).…”

“…In addition to clear lexical differences, grammatical ones might also emerge. For instance, Courteau et al (2019) showed that adult speakers of Québec French did not systematically process incorrect omission of subject-verb plural liaison, while Bourget (1987) suggests that this kind of liaison is rarely produced orally in informal Québec French. Speakers would very rarely use the plural feminine thirdperson pronoun elles [ɛlz], "they.fem."…”