Potato not Pope: human brain potentials to gender expectation and agreement in Spanish spoken sentences

Abstract

Event-related potentials were used to examine the role of grammatical gender in auditory sentence comprehension. Native Spanish speakers listened to sentence pairs in which a drawing depicting a noun was either congruent or incongruent with sentence meaning, and agreed or disagreed in gender with the immediately preceding spoken article. Semantically incongruent drawings elicited an N400 regardless of gender agreement. A similar negativity to prior articles of gender opposite to that of the contextually expected noun suggests that listeners predict specific words during comprehension. Gender disagreements at the drawing also elicited an increased negativity with a later onset and distribution distinct from the canonical N400, indicating that comprehenders attend to gender agreement, even when one of the words is only implicitly represented by a drawing.

Event-related brain potentials during the monitoring of speech errors

“…While the picture alone provides information about the content of a potential description, several different sentences including different syntactic structures are possible. The PMNs and the implied prediction mechanism are in accordance with previous work suggesting a prediction mechanism on the basis of verbal material alone (DeLong et al, 2005;Van Berkum et al, 2005;Wicha et al, 2003). 1 We assume that prediction is avoided when speech was taskirrelevant due to the associated processing costs.…”

“…The prediction effects in the above-mentioned studies suggest that predicted words included morphosyntactic (e.g. syntactic gender; Van Berkum et al, 2005;Wicha et al, 2003) and word form information (e.g. phonology; DeLong et al, 2005).…”

“…It has been suggested that language users not only try to narrow the range of expected words, but can, given sufficient context information, predict specific word forms before the words have been presented (DeLong, Urbach, and Kutas, 2005;Van Berkum et al, 2005;Wicha, Bates, Moreno, and Kutas, 2003). In these studies, the question of whether specific word forms were anticipated on-line was tested during the processing of so-called test words that preceded the anticipated word.…”

Anticipating Upcoming Words in Discourse: Evidence From ERPs and Reading Times.

“…An example item is shown in Example 3 below, with the Dutch original followed by an approximate translation in English. The paradigm we developed here to test for discourse-based lexical prediction before the word itself comes along is actually very similar to the paradigm recently used by Wicha, Kutas, and colleagues (Wicha, Moreno, & Kutas, 2004; see also Wicha, Bates, Moreno, & Kutas, 2003;. In the most relevant experiment (Wicha et al, 2004), native speakers of Spanish read constraining sentences that were biased toward a particular Spanish noun with a specific syntactic gender (a translated example would be Little Red Riding Hood carried the food for her grandmother in a .…”

Electrophysiological evidence for incremental lexical-semantic integration in auditory compound comprehension

“…Such an immediate integration account can be derived from the immediate use of lexical (-semantic) knowledge as shown in sentence processing (e.g. DeLong, Urbach, & Kutas, 2005;Van Berkum, Brown, Zwitserlood, Kooijman, & Hagoort, 2005;Wicha, Bates, Moreno., & Kutas, 2003). However, the available data on compound processing are in line with a delayed integration account (Isel et al, 2003) which might also be related to the fact that compounds do not have propositional content as sentences usually do.…”