The influence of semantic category membership on syntactic decisions: a study using event-related brain potentials.
An event-related brain potentials (ERP) experiment was carried out to investigate the influence of semantic category membership on syntactic decision-making. Native speakers of German viewed a series of words that were semantically marked or unmarked for gender and made go/no-go decisions about the grammatical gender of those words. The electrophysiological results indicated that participants could make a gender decision earlier when words were semantically gender-marked than when they were semantically gender-unmarked. Our data provide evidence for the influence of semantic category membership on the decision of the syntactic gender of a visually presented German noun. More specifically, our results support models of language comprehension in which semantic information processing of words is initiated prior to syntactic information processing is finalized.
Schiller
Niels O
NO
Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology, Maastricht University, P.O. Box 616, 6200 MD Maastricht, The Netherlands. n.schiller@psychology.unimaas.nl
Schuhmann
Teresa
T
Neyndorff
Alessia C
AC
Jansma
Bernadette M
BM
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D000328:Adult; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology*; D003657:Decision Making / Q000502:physiology*; D004569:Electroencephalography / Q000379:methods; D005072:Evoked Potentials, Auditory / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D012660:Semantics; D012727:Sex Characteristics