Electrophysiology of subject-verb agreement mediated by speakers' gender.

Adriana Hanulíková,Manuel Carreiras

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01396

Abstract

An important property of speech is that it explicitly conveys features of a speaker’s identity such as age or gender. This event-related potential (ERP) study examined the effects of social information provided by a speaker’s gender, i.e., the conceptual representation of gender, on subject–verb agreement. Despite numerous studies on agreement, little is known about syntactic computations generated by speaker characteristics extracted from the acoustic signal. Slovak is well suited to investigate this issue because it is a morphologically rich language in which agreement involves features for number, case, and gender. Grammaticality of a sentence can be evaluated by checking a speaker’s gender as conveyed by his/her voice. We examined how conceptual information about speaker gender, which is not syntactic but rather social and pragmatic in nature, is interpreted for the computation of agreement patterns. ERP responses to verbs disagreeing with the speaker’s gender (e.g., a sentence including a masculine verbal inflection spoken by a female person ‘the neighbors were upset because I ∗stoleMASC plums’) elicited a larger early posterior negativity compared to correct sentences. When the agreement was purely syntactic and did not depend on the speaker’s gender, a disagreement between a formally marked subject and the verb inflection (e.g., the womanFEM ∗stoleMASC plums) resulted in a larger P600 preceded by a larger anterior negativity compared to the control sentences. This result is in line with proposals according to which the recruitment of non-syntactic information such as the gender of the speaker results in N400-like effects, while formally marked syntactic features lead to structural integration as reflected in a LAN/P600 complex.

Highlights

An important aspect of language comprehension is that listeners are able to efficiently establish the relation between words in an utterance and to extract meaning in just the right way
Examining the way in which listeners respond to the standard use of agreement features provides insight into how relations between words are computed and how computational problems related to the rules of a given language or a variety are solved
Do listeners use speaker-specific characteristics for the computation of grammatical agreement features? Despite numerous studies on agreement, little is known about syntactic computations generated by speaker characteristics extracted from spoken language

Summary

Introduction

An important aspect of language comprehension is that listeners are able to efficiently establish the relation between words in an utterance and to extract meaning in just the right way. The processing of the non-standard utterance the cat scratch produced by a small child may not be hindered if a listener is able to use extra-linguistic information about the child’s incomplete mastery of the standard verb singular agreement. In such a case, anticipating a non-standard use of syntactic dependencies could potentially facilitate rather than hinder the overall processing effort (e.g., Hanulíková et al, 2012). Despite numerous studies on agreement, little is known about syntactic computations generated by speaker characteristics extracted from spoken language Do listeners use speaker-specific characteristics for the computation of grammatical agreement features? Despite numerous studies on agreement, little is known about syntactic computations generated by speaker characteristics extracted from spoken language

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion