Interference patterns in subject-verb agreement and reflexives revisited: A large-sample study.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Jager LA
PROVIDER: S-EPMC7583648 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:We explore the language production process by eliciting subject-verb agreement errors. Participants were asked to create complete sentences from sentence beginnings such as The elf's/elves' house with the tiny window/windows and The statue in the elf's/elves' gardens. These are subject noun phrases containing a head noun and controller of agreement (statue) and two nonheads, a "local noun" (window(s)/garden(s)), and a possessor noun (elf's/elves'). Past research has shown that a plural nonhead noun (an "attractor") within a subject noun phrase triggers the production of verb agreement errors, and further, that the nearer the attractor to the head noun, the greater the interference. This effect can be interpreted in terms of relative hierarchical distance from the head noun, or via a processing window account, which claims that during production, there is a window in which the head and modifying material may be co-active, and an attractor must be active at the same time as the head to give rise to errors. Using possessors attached at different heights within the same window, we are able to empirically distinguish these accounts. Possessors also allow us to explore two additional issues. First, case marking of local nouns has been shown to reduce agreement errors in languages with "rich" inflectional systems, and we explore whether English speakers attend to case. Secondly, formal syntactic analyses differ regarding the structural position of the possessive marker, and we distinguish them empirically with the relative magnitude of errors produced by possessors and local nouns. Our results show that, across the board, plural possessors are significantly less disruptive to the agreement process than plural local nouns. Proximity to the head noun matters: a possessor directly modifying the head noun induce a significant number of errors, but a possessor within a modifying prepositional phrase did not, though the local noun did. These findings suggest that proximity to a head noun is independent of a "processing window" effect. They also support a noun phrase-internal, case-like analysis of the structural position of the possessive ending and show that even speakers of inflectionally impoverished languages like English are sensitive to morphophonological case-like marking.
| S-EPMC4852295 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Considering the crosstalk between brain networks that contain linguistic and emotional information and that no studies have examined the impact of semantic information of affective nature on subject-verb number agreement, the present Event Related Potential (ERP) study investigated the extent to which emotional local nouns whose number mismatched that of subject head nouns might be considered by the parser during comprehension of grammatically correct sentences. To this end, twenty-eight Spanish native speakers were tested on a self-paced reading task while their brain activity was recorded. The experimental materials consisted of 120 sentences where the valence (negative vs. neutral) and number (singular vs. plural) of the local noun of the singular subject noun-phrase (NP) were manipulated; El gorro de aquel/aquellos cazador(es)/mecánico(s) era… [The hat of that/those hunter(s)/mechanic(s) was…]. ERP results measured in the local noun position showed that valence and number interacted in the 300-500 ms (negative component) and 780-880 ms (late positivity) time windows. In the (target) verb position, the two factors only interacted in the late 780-880 ms time window, revealing an "ungrammatical illusion" for plural marked neutral words. Our findings suggest that number agreement is sensitive to affective meaning but that the emotional information of an attractor is considered in different operations and at different stages during grammatical sentence processing; it can affect lexical and syntactic representation retrieval of a subject-NP and impact agreement encoding only at late stages of processing, during verb agreement and feature integration.
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Project description: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.
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Project description:Previous ERP studies have often reported two ERP components-LAN and P600-in response to subject-verb (S-V) agreement violations (e.g., the boys (*) runs). However, the latency, amplitude and scalp distribution of these components have been shown to vary depending on various experiment-related factors. One factor that has not received attention is the extent to which the relative perceptual salience related to either the utterance position (verbal inflection in utterance-medial vs. utterance-final contexts) or the type of agreement violation (errors of omission vs. errors of commission) may influence the auditory processing of S-V agreement. The lack of reports on these effects in ERP studies may be due to the fact that most studies have used the visual modality, which does not reveal acoustic information. To address this gap, we used ERPs to measure the brain activity of Australian English-speaking adults while they listened to sentences in which the S-V agreement differed by type of agreement violation and utterance position. We observed early negative and positive clusters (AN/P600 effects) for the overall grammaticality effect. Further analysis revealed that the mean amplitude and distribution of the P600 effect was only significant in contexts where the S-V agreement violation occurred utterance-finally, regardless of type of agreement violation. The mean amplitude and distribution of the negativity did not differ significantly across types of agreement violation and utterance position. These findings suggest that the increased perceptual salience of the violation in utterance final position (due to phrase-final lengthening) influenced how S-V agreement violations were processed during sentence comprehension. Implications for the functional interpretation of language-related ERPs and experimental design are discussed.
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Project description:Non-adjacent dependencies are thought to be more costly to process than sentences wherein dependents immediately follow or precede what they depend on. In English locality effects have been revealed, while in languages with rich case marking (German and Hindi) sentence final structures show anti-locality-effects. The motivation of the current study is to test whether locality effects can be directly applied to a typologically different language than those investigated so far. Hungarian is a "topic prominent" language; it permits a variation of possible word sequencing for semantic reasons, including SVO word order. Hungarian also has a rich morphological system (e.g., rich case system) and postpositions to indicate grammatical functions. In the present ERP study, Hungarian subject-verb dependencies were compared by manipulating the mismatch of number agreement between the sentence's initial noun phrase and the sentence's final intransitive verb as well as the complexity of the intervening sentence material, interrupting the dependencies. Possible lexical class and frequency or cloze-probability effects for the first two words of the intervening sentence material were revealed when used separate baseline for each word, while at the third word of the intervening material as well as at the main verb ERPs were not modulated by complexity but at the verb ERPs were enhanced by grammaticality. Ungrammatical sentences enlarged the amplitude of both LAN and P600 components at the main verb. These results are in line with studies suggesting that the retrieval of the first element of a dependency is not influenced by distance from the second element, as the first element is directly accessible when needed for integration (e.g., McElree, 2000).
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Project description:When presented with a novel verb in a transitive frame (X is Ving Y), young children typically select a causative event referent, rather than one in which agents engage in parallel, non-causative synchronous events. However, when presented with a conjoined-subject intransitive frame (X and Y are Ving), participants (even adults, as we show) are at chance. Although in some instances, children older than three can obtain above-chance-level performance, these experiments still appear to rely upon a within-experiment contrast with the transitive frame. This leads us to ask whether children can achieve success with the intransitive frame without such a contrast among constructions, and map a novel verb appearing in such a frame onto a non-causative meaning. Building on recent evidence that adverbial modifiers can support word learning for adjectives and for verbs (when both nominal and verbal candidate interpretations are considered) by directing children to a particular construal of a scene, we test the hypothesis that a semantically informative modifier, together, will provide children with additional lexical information that allows them to narrow down verb meaning and identify a non-causative interpretation for a novel verb appearing in the conjoined-subject intransitive frame. We find that for English-speaking children and adults it does, but only when together directly modifies the verb phrase, suggesting that participants appeal to compositionality and not just the brute addition of another word, even one that is semantically meaningful, to arrive at the intended interpretation. Children acquiring Mandarin Chinese, in contrast, do not succeed with the translation-equivalent of together (although adult speakers do), but they do with d?u (roughly, the distributive quantifier "each"). Our results point to a valuable source of information young children learning verbs: modifiers with familiar semantics.
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Project description:Typically, processing is more accurate and efficient for concrete than abstract concepts in both healthy adults and individuals with aphasia. While, concreteness effects have been thoroughly documented with respect to noun processing, other words classes have received little attention despite tending to be less concrete than nouns. The aim of the current study was to explore concrete-abstract differences in verbs and identify their neural correlates in post-stroke aphasia. Given the dearth of comprehension tests for verbs, a battery of neuropsychological tests was developed in this study to assess the comprehension of concrete and abstract verbs. Specifically, a sensitive verb synonym judgment test was generated that varied both the items' imageability and frequency, and a picture-to-word matching test with numerous concrete verbs. Normative data were then collected and the tests were administered to a cohort of 48 individuals with chronic post-stroke aphasia to explore the behavioural patterns and neural correlates of verb processing. The results revealed significantly better comprehension of concrete than abstract verbs, aligning with the existing aphasiological literature on noun processing. In addition, the patients performed better during verb comprehension than verb production. Lesion-symptom correlational analyses revealed common areas that support processing of concrete and abstract verbs, including the left anterior temporal lobe, posterior supramarginal gyrus and superior lateral occipital cortex. A direct contrast between them revealed additional regions with graded differences. Specifically, the left frontal regions were associated with processing abstract verbs; whereas, the left posterior temporal and occipital regions were associated with processing concrete verbs. Moreover, overlapping and distinct neural correlates were identified in association with the comprehension and production of concrete verbs. These patient findings align with data from functional neuroimaging and neuro-stimulation, and existing models of language organisation.
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Project description:While most studies on neural signals of online language processing have focused on a few-usually western-subject-verb-object (SVO) languages, corresponding knowledge on subject-object-verb (SOV) languages is scarce. Here we studied Farsi, a language with canonical SOV word order. Because we were interested in the consequences of second-language acquisition, we compared monolingual native Farsi speakers and equally proficient bilinguals who had learned Farsi only after entering primary school. We analyzed event-related potentials (ERPs) to correct and morphosyntactically incorrect sentence-final syllables in a sentence correctness judgment task. Incorrect syllables elicited a late posterior positivity at 500-700 ms after the final syllable, resembling the P600 component, as previously observed for syntactic violations at sentence-middle positions in SVO languages. There was no sign of a left anterior negativity (LAN) preceding the P600. Additionally, we provide evidence for a real-time discrimination of phonological categories associated with morphosyntactic manipulations (between 35 and 135 ms), manifesting the instantaneous neural response to unexpected perturbations. The L2 Farsi speakers were indistinguishable from L1 speakers in terms of performance and neural signals of syntactic violations, indicating that exposure to a second language at school entry may results in native-like performance and neural correlates. In nonnative (but not native) speakers verbal working memory capacity correlated with the late posterior positivity and performance accuracy. Hence, this first ERP study of morphosyntactic violations in a spoken SOV nominative-accusative language demonstrates ERP effects in response to morphosyntactic violations and the involvement of executive functions in non-native speakers in computations of subject-verb agreement.
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Project description:In this study we focused on direct comparison between the spatial distributions of activation detected by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and localization of sources detected by magnetoencephalography (MEG) during identical language tasks. We examined the spatial concordance between MEG and fMRI results in 16 adolescents performing a three-phase verb generation task that involves repeating the auditorily presented concrete noun and generating verbs either overtly or covertly in response to the auditorily presented noun. MEG analysis was completed using a synthetic aperture magnetometry (SAM) technique, while the fMRI data were analyzed using the general linear model approach with random-effects. To quantify the agreement between the two modalities, we implemented voxel-wise concordance correlation coefficient (CCC) and identified the left inferior frontal gyrus and the bilateral motor cortex with high CCC values. At the group level, MEG and fMRI data showed spatial convergence in the left inferior frontal gyrus for covert or overt generation versus overt repetition, and the bilateral motor cortex when overt generation versus covert generation. These findings demonstrate the utility of the CCC as a quantitative measure of spatial convergence between two neuroimaging techniques.
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