Time-driven effects on processing grammatical agreement

Summary, in English

‘Agreement’ is a grammatical relation between words; e.g., the verbal suffix –s reflects agreement with a singular subject (He run-s). Previous studies with time intervals under 2.5 s between disagreeing words have found a left-lateralized negative brain potential, arguably reflecting detection of the morphosyntactic violation. We tested the neurophysiological effects of number agreement between the first and last word in sentences at temporal distances between 1.75 and 3.25 s. Distances were varied by visually presenting sentences word by word at different rates. For distances under 2.5 s, a left-lateralized negativity was observed. At a 3.25-s interval, an anterior, slightly right-lateralized negativity was found. At an intermediate distance of 2.75 s, the difference between disagreement and agreement at left electrodes correlated with participants’ working memory span. Results indicate that different brain processes occur when agreement involves agreement domains approaching and exceeding 3 s than when the agreement dependency involves shorter temporal intervals.

• Author: Mikael Roll; Sabine Gosselke Berthelsen; Magnus Lindgren; Merle Horne
• Department/s: General Linguistics; Department of Psychology
• Publishing year: 2013
• Language: English
• Publication/Series: Frontiers in Psychology
• Volume: 4
• Full text: - 1 MB; Download statistics
• Links: http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.01004
• Document type: Journal article
• Publisher: Frontiers Media S. A.
• Topic: Psychology
• Keywords: agreement; grammatical dependency; ERP; left anterior negativity; LAN; short-term memory; working memory; P600
• Status: Published
• Project: Neurophysiology of syntactic processing and timing constraints on working memory; Thinking in Time: Cognition, Communication and Learning
• ISBN/ISSN/Other: ISSN: 1664-1078