Is the LAN effect in morphosyntactic processing an ERP artifact?

Caffarra, Sendy; Mendoza, Martha; Davidson, Douglas

doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2019.01.003

Cited by 36 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…Other researchers have argued that the LAN is reminiscent of the N400 (e.g., Service et al, 2007; Guajardo and Wicha, 2014; Tanner and van Hell, 2014; but see Molinaro et al, 2015), a component related to lexical retrieval and semantic integration (see Lau et al, 2008 for a review). Recent work by Caffarra et al (2019), however, suggests that the LAN can characterize agreement progressing independently of the N400 (at least, for determiner–noun gender errors in Spanish). Yet, others have argued that agreement violations yield either a LAN or an N400, depending on the levels of representation (e.g., morphosyntax, discourse) that are disrupted by the error (e.g., Mancini et al, 2011a).…”

Section: Erp Literature On Agreementmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Bañón

Rothman

2019

Front. Psychol.

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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.

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Section: Erp Literature On Agreementmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Bañón

Rothman

2019

Front. Psychol.

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“…The largest body of evidence on agreement mechanisms comes from research using ERPs, most often assessing morphosyntactic agreement during written phrase or sentence comprehension in healthy individuals (Molinaro, Barber, & Carreiras, 2011). Studies investigated Romance languages such as Spanish (Barber & Carreiras, 2005;Caffarra & Barber, 2015;Caffarra, Janssen, & Barber, 2014;Caffarra, Mendoza, & Davidson, 2019), Italian (Angrilli et al, 2002;Caffarra, Siyanova-Chanturia, Pesciarelli, Vespignani, & Cacciari, 2015;De Vincenzi et al, 2003;Molinaro, Vespignani, & Job, 2008;Molinaro, Vespignani, Zamparelli, &Job, 2011), andFrench (Frenck-Mestre, Osterhout, McLaughlin, &Foucart, 2008). This body of evidence capitalized on the different roles of the two components that are associated with the processing of agreement violations.…”

Section: Electrophysiological Studies On Agreementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neurolinguistic Research on the Romance Languages

Bambini¹,

Canal²

2021

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics

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Neurolinguistics is devoted to the study of the language-brain relationship, using the methodologies of neuropsychology and cognitive neuroscience to investigate how linguistic categories are grounded in the brain. Although the brain infrastructure for language is invariable across cultures, neural networks might operate differently depending on language-specific features. In this respect, neurolinguistic research on the Romance languages, mostly French, Italian, and Spanish, proved key to progress the field, especially with specific reference to how the neural infrastructure for language works in the case of more richly inflected systems than English. Among the most popular domains of investigation are agreement patterns, where studies on Spanish and Italian showed that agreement across features and domains (e.g., number or gender agreement) engages partially different neural substrates. Also, studies measuring the electrophysiological response suggested that agreement processing is a composite mechanism involving different temporal steps. Another domain is the noun-verb distinction, where studies on the Romance languages indicated that the brain is more sensitive to the greater morphosyntactic engagement of verbs compared with nouns rather than to the grammatical class distinction per se. Concerning language disorders, the Romance languages shed new light on inflectional errors in aphasic speakers and contributed to revise the notion of agrammatism, which is not simply omission of morphemes but might involve incorrect substitution from the inflectional paradigm. Also, research in the Romance domain showed variation in degree and pattern of reading impairments due to language-specific segmental and suprasegmental features. Despite these important contributions, the Romance family, with its multitude of languages and dialects and a richly documented diachronic evolution, is a still underutilized ‘treasure house’ for neurolinguistic research, with significant room for investigations exploring the brain signatures of language variation in time and space and refining the linking between linguistic categories and neurobiological primitives.

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“…Mancini and colleagues [33] found that, as with outright person anomalies, processing unagreement yielded a posteriorly distributed negative effect, but unlike them, no P600 effect was found, suggesting that detection of morphosyntactic mismatch did not trigger the grand-averaging process that obscure potential individual variability in the ERP response. As this issue appears to be tangential to the purpose of the current chapter, the reader is referred to [97,[112][113][114] for further readings.…”

Section: ---Please Insert Table 1 Around Here ---mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…German: [94,95] Italian: [23,26]; Spanish: [24,25,28,32,33,96,97]; English: [19]; Hebrew: [98]; Basque: [34,99,100]; Dutch: [55,101] Most cats like/*likes to play outside [19] Number agreement violation: *El turista3sg visitaron3pl un parque muy grande Person agreement violation: *El turista3sg visitaste2sg un parque muy grande The tourist3sg visited3sg a very big park Spanish: [24] LAN + P600 N400 + P600…”

Section: Agreement Violationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sentence processing: How words generate syntactic structures in the brain

Martorell¹,

Morucci²,

Mancini³

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Language comprehension relies on the fundamental ability to create meaningful syntactic structures from single words during on-line processing. Time-resolved neuroimaging techniques can be used to measure electrophysiological activity revealing the neural dynamics underpinning these combinatorial processes in the brain. In the present chapter, we review and critically evaluate studies that have specifically investigated the electrophysiological bases of sentence-level syntactic processing using different types of analyses and paradigms. Besides reviewing event-related potential (ERP) studies, we focus on recent investigations of neural oscillations, highlighting their relevance and implications for our understanding of syntactic processing. Furthermore, we discuss critical issues related to the interpretation of current electrophysiological findings, including open questions such as the relationship between syntax and semantics and the link between ERPs and oscillations.

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Is the LAN effect in morphosyntactic processing an ERP artifact?

Cited by 36 publications

References 26 publications

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

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

Neurolinguistic Research on the Romance Languages

Sentence processing: How words generate syntactic structures in the brain

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