title: The influence of semantic category membership on syntactic decisions: a study using event-related brain potentials.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology, Maastricht University, P.O. Box 616, 6200 MD Maastricht, The Netherlands. n.schiller@psychology.unimaas.nl
authors.forename: Niels O
authors.initials: NO
authors.lastname: Schiller
authors.forename: Teresa
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Schuhmann
authors.forename: Alessia C
authors.initials: AC
authors.lastname: Neyndorff
authors.forename: Bernadette M
authors.initials: BM
authors.lastname: Jansma
mesh_terms: 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