The influence of semantic and phonological factors on syntactic decisions: an event-related brain potential study.
During language production and comprehension, information about a word's syntactic properties is sometimes needed. While the decision about the grammatical gender of a word requires access to syntactic knowledge, it has also been hypothesized that semantic (i.e., biological gender) or phonological information (i.e., sound regularities) may influence this decision. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were measured while native speakers of German processed written words that were or were not semantically and/or phonologically marked for gender. Behavioral and ERP results showed that participants were faster in making a gender decision when words were semantically and/or phonologically gender marked than when this was not the case, although the phonological effects were less clear. In conclusion, our data provide evidence that even though participants performed a grammatical gender decision, this task can be influenced by semantic and phonological factors.
Faculty of Psychology, Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Maastricht, Maastricht, The Netherlands. n.schiller@psychology.unimaas.nl
Niels O
NO
Schiller
Thomas F
TF
Münte
Iemke
I
Horemans
Bernadette M
BM
Jansma
D000328:Adult; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D003463:Cues; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006309:Hearing / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D012660:Semantics; D012727:Sex Characteristics; D013060:Speech / Q000502:physiology*