| |
Abstract:
Abstract: While grammatical gender is widespread across the
world's languages, its role in processing is poorly understood.
Wicha, Bates, Hernandez, Reyes and Gavaldon (1998) found that
gender interacts with semantic information during on-line sentence
processing, to facilitate or inhibit picture naming times in
Spanish. The current study uses event-related potentials (ERPs) to
further examine the nature and time course of the effect of gender
in sentence processing. Native Spanish speakers listened for
comprehension to pairs of Spanish sentences, wherein one of the
nouns was replaced by a line drawing. The object depicted by the
drawing was either semantically congruent or incongruent within the
sentence context. In addition, the object's name either agreed or
disagreed in gender with the preceding determiner (e.g., el, la).
Semantically incongruent drawings elicited a classic N400,
regardless of gender agreement. Its amplitude, however, was
sensitive to the gender of the determiner, with smaller negativity
for gender mismatches than matches, especially over fronto-central
recording sites. Semantically congruent items elicited the expected
late positivity. Again, its amplitude was modulated over frontal
sites by gender agreement with the determiner, where gender
mismatches were associated with somewhat greater frontal
positivity. In sum, gender and semantic mismatches evoke different
neural processes, but still interact during sentence comprehension.
Listeners use the gender of a preceding determiner to integrate a
drawing with a sentence's meaning.
|
