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Identifying the null subject: evidence from event-related brain potentials
J Demestre1, S Meltzer, J E García-Albea
1Departament de Psicologia, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain.
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research
|May 27, 1999
Summary
The brain detects gender agreement violations in Spanish sentences within milliseconds. This suggests that language processing systems establish pronoun-antecedent relationships during real-time comprehension.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Neuroscience
- Computational Linguistics
Background:
- Investigating real-time language comprehension.
- Understanding syntactic gender agreement in Spanish.
- Examining the parser's ability to establish coreference relations.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the on-line effects of gender agreement violations in Spanish infinitival complements.
- To determine if the language parser detects violations of gender agreement in real-time.
- To explore the neural correlates of detecting such violations using event-related brain potentials (ERPs).
Main Methods:
- Recording event-related brain potentials (ERPs) during spoken language comprehension.
- Constructing controlled Spanish sentences with manipulated gender agreement in complement clauses.
- Comparing ERPs elicited by grammatical and ungrammatical sentences.
Main Results:
- A complex biphasic ERP response (early negativity followed by centroparietal positivity) was observed in the violating condition.
- This ERP pattern emerged within a few hundred milliseconds of the gender agreement violation.
- The findings indicate sensitivity to NP-adjective gender agreement violations.
Conclusions:
- The language parser establishes coreference between the null subject of an infinitive clause and its antecedent in real-time.
- The brain exhibits rapid neural responses to syntactic gender agreement violations.
- These results provide evidence for the parser's ability to maintain and utilize grammatical information during comprehension.