Neurolinguistic signatures of microvariation and language change: Individual production variability predicts...

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Linguistics
• Psychology

Background:

• Grammatical microvariation and morphosyntactic change present unique research opportunities.
• Norwegian participial agreement exhibits widespread, continuous variation across dialects and speakers.
• Understanding the interplay between language production and on-line processing is crucial.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the neurophysiological and behavioral effects of grammatical microvariation.
• To explore the relationship between individual production patterns and sentence processing.
• To examine how ongoing morphosyntactic change influences language comprehension.

Main Methods:

• Event-related potentials (ERPs) recorded from 156 participants.
• Participants read sentences with invariant (control) and variable/changing (target) grammatical forms.
• Analysis of dialect background, individual production frequencies, age, and spoken agreement rates.

Main Results:

• Group-level dialect background and individual production frequencies modulate sentence processing.
• Participants from dialect change regions showed attenuated P600 effects and gradient acceptability judgments.
• Neural sensitivity to agreement violations was modulated by individual age and spoken agreement rates.

Conclusions:

• Language processing is dynamically shaped by fine-grained individual linguistic experiences.
• Community-level exposure, personal production frequencies, and sociolinguistic positioning influence language comprehension.
• Variation in dialectal grammar impacts integration costs during standard language comprehension.