title: Discourse before gender: an event-related brain potential study on the interplay of semantic and syntactic information during spoken language understanding.
abstract: A study is presented on the effects of discourse-semantic and lexical-syntactic information during spoken sentence processing. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were registered while subjects listened to discourses that ended in a sentence with a temporary syntactic ambiguity. The prior discourse-semantic information biased toward one analysis of the temporary ambiguity, whereas the lexical-syntactic information allowed only for the alternative analysis. The ERP results show that discourse-semantic information can momentarily take precedence over syntactic information, even if this violates grammatical gender agreement rules.
authors.affiliation: Neurocognition of Language Processing Research Group, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: C M
authors.initials: CM
authors.lastname: Brown
authors.forename: J J
authors.initials: JJ
authors.lastname: van Berkum
authors.forename: P
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Hagoort
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D012660:Semantics; D012723:Sex; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*