Grammatical agreement processing in reading: ERP findings and future directions

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Neuroscience of Language
• Cognitive Science

Background:

• Sentence comprehension involves processing agreement dependencies, typically viewed as a syntax-driven process.
• Event-related potential (ERP) studies investigate the neural basis of agreement mismatches, often observing Left Anterior Negativity (LAN) and P600 effects.

Purpose of the Study:

• To review ERP literature on sentence comprehension and agreement processing.
• To explore how different dimensions of agreement (features, constituents, language) influence neural responses.
• To propose a model where agreement processing integrates syntactic and non-syntactic information.

Main Methods:

• Review of existing Event-Related Potential (ERP) studies on sentence comprehension.
• Analysis of electrophysiological patterns (LAN, P600, N400) associated with agreement mismatches.
• Focus on the interplay between formal agreement rules and semantic/contextual information.

Main Results:

• Agreement mismatches typically elicit a biphasic ERP pattern (LAN and P600).
• The LAN component may reflect expectancy violations in functional morphology, while P600 reflects structural integration.
• Morphosyntactic information can activate higher-level, non-syntactic representations (N400-like effects).

Conclusions:

• Agreement processing is sensitive to feature type and constituent structure.
• Neural computations for agreement are not solely rule-based or syntactic.
• Sentence-level relations involve integrating morphosyntactic information with non-syntactic context, influencing comprehension.