First Event-Related Potentials Evidence of Auditory Morphosyntactic Processing in a Subject-Object-Verb...

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Linguistics
• Psychology

Background:

• Most research on language processing neural signals focuses on Western subject-verb-object (SVO) languages.
• Knowledge on subject-object-verb (SOV) languages, like Farsi, is limited.
• Understanding second language acquisition (SLA) effects on neural processing is crucial.

Purpose of the Study:

• Investigate neural signals of morphosyntactic violations in Farsi, an SOV language.
• Compare native Farsi speakers (L1) with proficient bilinguals who learned Farsi after primary school (L2).
• Examine the impact of early L2 acquisition on native-like neural processing.

Main Methods:

• Event-related potentials (ERPs) were analyzed in a sentence correctness judgment task.
• Participants heard correct and morphosyntactically incorrect sentence-final syllables.
• Neural responses were measured for both native and non-native Farsi speakers.

Main Results:

• Incorrect syllables elicited a late posterior positivity (P600), similar to SVO languages.
• No left anterior negativity (LAN) was observed preceding the P600.
• Early L2 Farsi speakers showed indistinguishable performance and neural signals from L1 speakers.
• Verbal working memory correlated with performance in non-native speakers.

Conclusions:

• This study provides the first ERP evidence of morphosyntactic violations in a spoken SOV language.
• Early L2 acquisition can lead to native-like neural correlates for language processing.
• Executive functions, like working memory, are involved in non-native speakers' agreement computations.