Electrophysiology of subject-verb agreement mediated by speakers’ gender
An important property of speech is that it explicitly conveys features of a speaker's identity such as age or gender. This event-related potential (ERP) study examined the effects of social information provided by a speaker’s gender, i.e. the conceptual representation of gender, on subject-verb...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Frontiers Media S.A.
2015-09-01
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| Series: | Frontiers in Psychology |
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| Online Access: | http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01396/full |
| _version_ | 1811209879085383680 |
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| author | Adriana eHanulíková Manuel eCarreiras Manuel eCarreiras Manuel eCarreiras |
| author_facet | Adriana eHanulíková Manuel eCarreiras Manuel eCarreiras Manuel eCarreiras |
| author_sort | Adriana eHanulíková |
| collection | DOAJ |
| description | An important property of speech is that it explicitly conveys features of a speaker's identity such as age or gender. This event-related potential (ERP) study examined the effects of social information provided by a speaker’s gender, i.e. the conceptual representation of gender, on subject-verb agreement. Despite numerous studies on agreement, little is known about syntactic computations generated by speaker characteristics extracted from the acoustic signal. Slovak is well suited to investigate this issue because it is a morphologically rich language in which agreement involves features for number, case, and gender. Grammaticality of a sentence can be evaluated by checking a speaker’s gender as conveyed by his/her voice. We examined how conceptual information about speaker gender, which is not syntactic but rather social and pragmatic in nature, is interpreted for the computation of agreement patterns. ERP responses to verbs disagreeing with the speaker's gender (e.g., a sentence including a masculine verbal inflection spoken by a female person 'the neighbours were upset because I *stoleMASC plums’) elicited a larger early posterior negativity compared to correct sentences. When the agreement was purely syntactic and did not depend on the speaker’s gender, a disagreement between a formally-marked subject and the verb inflection (e.g., the womanFEM *stoleMASC plums) resulted in a larger P600 preceded by a larger anterior negativity compared to the control sentences. This result is in line with proposals according to which the recruitment of non-syntactic information such as the gender of the speaker results in N400-like effects, while formally-marked syntactic features lead to structural integration as reflected in a LAN/P600 complex. |
| first_indexed | 2024-04-12T04:46:29Z |
| format | Article |
| id | doaj.art-121a8298f77540fa8d02b2582c449aff |
| institution | Directory Open Access Journal |
| issn | 1664-1078 |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-04-12T04:46:29Z |
| publishDate | 2015-09-01 |
| publisher | Frontiers Media S.A. |
| record_format | Article |
| series | Frontiers in Psychology |
| spelling | doaj.art-121a8298f77540fa8d02b2582c449aff2022-12-22T03:47:27ZengFrontiers Media S.A.Frontiers in Psychology1664-10782015-09-01610.3389/fpsyg.2015.01396153644Electrophysiology of subject-verb agreement mediated by speakers’ genderAdriana eHanulíková0Manuel eCarreiras1Manuel eCarreiras2Manuel eCarreiras3University of FreiburgBCBL Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and LanguageIKERBASQUE, Basque Foundation for ScienceUniversity of the Basque CountryAn important property of speech is that it explicitly conveys features of a speaker's identity such as age or gender. This event-related potential (ERP) study examined the effects of social information provided by a speaker’s gender, i.e. the conceptual representation of gender, on subject-verb agreement. Despite numerous studies on agreement, little is known about syntactic computations generated by speaker characteristics extracted from the acoustic signal. Slovak is well suited to investigate this issue because it is a morphologically rich language in which agreement involves features for number, case, and gender. Grammaticality of a sentence can be evaluated by checking a speaker’s gender as conveyed by his/her voice. We examined how conceptual information about speaker gender, which is not syntactic but rather social and pragmatic in nature, is interpreted for the computation of agreement patterns. ERP responses to verbs disagreeing with the speaker's gender (e.g., a sentence including a masculine verbal inflection spoken by a female person 'the neighbours were upset because I *stoleMASC plums’) elicited a larger early posterior negativity compared to correct sentences. When the agreement was purely syntactic and did not depend on the speaker’s gender, a disagreement between a formally-marked subject and the verb inflection (e.g., the womanFEM *stoleMASC plums) resulted in a larger P600 preceded by a larger anterior negativity compared to the control sentences. This result is in line with proposals according to which the recruitment of non-syntactic information such as the gender of the speaker results in N400-like effects, while formally-marked syntactic features lead to structural integration as reflected in a LAN/P600 complex.http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01396/fullERPN400P600subject-verb agreementextralinguistic factorsSocial language processing |
| spellingShingle | Adriana eHanulíková Manuel eCarreiras Manuel eCarreiras Manuel eCarreiras Electrophysiology of subject-verb agreement mediated by speakers’ gender Frontiers in Psychology ERP N400 P600 subject-verb agreement extralinguistic factors Social language processing |
| title | Electrophysiology of subject-verb agreement mediated by speakers’ gender |
| title_full | Electrophysiology of subject-verb agreement mediated by speakers’ gender |
| title_fullStr | Electrophysiology of subject-verb agreement mediated by speakers’ gender |
| title_full_unstemmed | Electrophysiology of subject-verb agreement mediated by speakers’ gender |
| title_short | Electrophysiology of subject-verb agreement mediated by speakers’ gender |
| title_sort | electrophysiology of subject verb agreement mediated by speakers gender |
| topic | ERP N400 P600 subject-verb agreement extralinguistic factors Social language processing |
| url | http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01396/full |
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