The nature of morphosyntactic processing during language perception. Evidence from an additional-task study in Spanish and German

Abstract

The present study investigates in how far morphosyntactic processing is affected by an additional non-verbal task and whether this effect differs between German and Spanish, two languages with differences in processing grammatical gender (lexical vs. cue-based processing). By manipulating task load and language we aimed at getting an insight into subprocesses of morphosyntax and their dependence on resources of general and verbal working memory, respectively. In more general terms, this study contributes to the debate on the modularity of morphosyntax. Written German or Spanish sentences with or without gender violations were presented word by word to native speakers. The critical words temporally overlapped in different degrees with a non-linguistic stimulus (a high or low tone). In a single task (Experiment 1) participants judged sentence acceptability and ignored the tones. Experiment 2 required a response to the tones. Left-anterior negativity (LAN) and P600 components were analyzed in the ERPs to critical words. Whereas the LAN was not affected by any of the experimental manipulations, the P600 was modulated as a function of language during the single task conditions (Experiment 1). In Experiment 2 the additional task did not add up with this effect; instead, the differences between language groups vanished. This may indicate that the processes reflected in the P600 draw on resources of general working memory. The LAN data seem to be in line with modularity of first pass morphosyntactic processing, although this interpretation contradicts findings from other studies. The P600 results may highlight the flexibility of sentence-based syntactic processing.