title: When persons disagree: an ERP study of Unagreement in Spanish.
abstract: Agreement is one of the main devices used by languages to signal grammatical relations. In this study, we investigated the neurophysiological processing correlates of subject-verb agreement in Spanish using Unagreement, a phenomenon characterized by a person mismatch between subject and verb that nonetheless produces a grammatical pattern. Unagreement was compared to well-formed sentences with full agreement, and ill-formed sentences with a person mismatch. Compared to control sentences, Unagreement produced a left posterior negativity followed by a more central negativity; no P600 effect was observed. In contrast, person violations generated a negativity that was widely distributed over the scalp, followed by a P600 effect. These data suggest that the comprehension of qualitatively different agreement patterns, which could reflect the performance of different processing routines, recruits different neural generators.
authors.affiliation: BCBL, Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain. s.mancini@bcbl.eu
authors.forename: Simona
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Mancini
authors.forename: Nicola
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Molinaro
authors.forename: Luigi
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Rizzi
authors.forename: Manuel
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Carreiras
mesh_terms: D001931:Brain Mapping; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology*; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult