Grammatical number agreement processing using the visual half-field paradigm: An event-related brain potential study

Abstract

Despite indications in the split-brain and lesion literatures that the right hemisphere is capable of some syntactic analysis, few studies have investigated right hemisphere contributions to syntactic processing in people with intact brains. Here we used the visual half-field paradigm in healthy adults to examine each hemisphere’s processing of correct and incorrect grammatical number agreement marked either lexically, e.g., antecedent/reflexive pronoun (“The grateful niece asked herself/*themselves…”) or morphologically, e.g., subject/verb (“Industrial scientists develop/*develops…”). For reflexives, response times and accuracy of grammaticality decisions suggested similar processing regardless of visual field of presentation. In the subject/verb condition, we observed similar response times and accuracies for central and right visual field (RVF) presentations. For left visual field (LVF) presentation, response times were longer and accuracy rates were reduced relative to RVF presentation. An event-related brain potential (ERP) study using the same materials revealed similar ERP responses to the reflexive pronouns in the two visual fields, but very different ERP effects to the subject/verb violations. For lexically marked violations on reflexives, P600 was elicited by stimuli in both the LVF and RVF; for morphologically marked violations on verbs, P600 was elicited only by RVF stimuli. These data suggest that both hemispheres can process lexically marked pronoun agreement violations, and do so in a similar fashion. Morphologically marked subject/verb agreement errors, however, showed a distinct LH advantage.

Two sides of gender: ERP evidence for the presence of two routes during gender agreement processing

“…The early effect observed for gender mismatches could possibly reflect the initial interference between the determiner and the gender feature of the noun retrieved as an abstract feature stored in the lexicon. The present findings would further suggest that both hemispheres can retrieve gender information as a lexical feature in order to compute agreement dependencies (see Kemmer et al, 2014, for similar results on number agreement).…”

“…Behavioural and ERP responses were recorded during the lateralized presentation. The recording of ERPs in combination with the visual-half field presentation has been used successfully in previous studies on lexico-semantic processing (Federmeier, Mai & Kutas, 2005;Federmeier, Wlotko, & Meyer, 2008), and recently, this method has also been used to study syntactic processing (Kemmer et al, 2014).…”

“…The LH may demonstrate early sensitivity to distributional cues conveyed by the word ending, given the LH advantage for sub-lexical information processing (Kemmer et al, 2014;Koenig et al, 1992;Zaidel, 1983). By contrast, the RH should not be sensitive at all or, at least, should be less skilled in detecting formal cues to gender (Gazzaniga & Hillyard, 1971;Gazzaniga et al, 1984;Kemmer et al, 2014;Koenig et al, 1992;Liu et al, 1999). Thus, the ERPs evoked by transparent and opaque nouns may not differ for LVF (RH) presentations, or may differ in later ERP components than the differences observed for RVF (LH) presentations.…”

“…In contrast, the RVF presentations (LH) always showed high accuracies, without significant difference between the two conditions. A recent ERP study (Kemmer, Coulson, & Kutas, 2014) employed a similar experimental design. They presented sentences with number agreement violations that could be expressed either lexically (e.g., "The grateful niece asked herself/themselves how she could repay her aunt") or morphologically (e.g., "Industrial scientists develop/develops many new consumer products").…”

Lateralization as a Symphony: Joint Influence of Interhemispheric Inhibition and Transmission Delay on Brain Asymmetry and Syntactic Processing

“…Classical discoveries of traumatic impact of the left hemisphere lesions on syntactic abilities (Manning & Thomas-Antérion, 2011) and imaging studies with healthy individuals (e.g., Friederici, Rüschemeyer, Hahne, & Fiebach, 2003;Hagoort, 2003) both indicate the dominant role of the LH in syntactic processing. Despite that the unilateral LH syntactic network is sometimes taken to implicate the absence of syntactic capability in the right hemisphere (RH), evidence indicates that the RH is capable of eliciting qualitatively similar syntactic responses as the LH does (Kemmer, Coulson, & Kutas, 2014;Lee & Federmeier, 2015). Hence, syntactic lateralization likely involves common basic mechanisms in both hemispheres that are activated to different degrees.…”