title: Agreement attraction during comprehension of grammatical sentences: ERP evidence from ellipsis.
abstract: Successful dependency resolution during language comprehension relies on accessing certain representations in memory, and not others. We recently reported event-related potential (ERP) evidence that syntactically unavailable, intervening attractor-nouns interfered during comprehension of Spanish noun-phrase ellipsis (the determiner otra/otro): grammatically correct determiners that mismatched the gender of attractor-nouns elicited a sustained negativity as also observed for incorrect determiners (Martin, Nieuwland, & Carreiras, 2012). The current study sought to extend this novel finding in sentences containing object-extracted relative clauses, where the antecedent may be less prominent. Whereas correct determiners that matched the gender of attractor-nouns now elicited an early anterior negativity as also observed for mismatching determiners, the previously reported interaction pattern was replicated in P600 responses to subsequent words. Our results suggest that structural and gender information is simultaneously taken into account, providing further evidence for retrieval interference during comprehension of grammatical sentences.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom; Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language, Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain. Electronic address: andrea.martin@ed.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Andrea E
authors.initials: AE
authors.lastname: Martin
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom; Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language, Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain.
authors.forename: Mante S
authors.initials: MS
authors.lastname: Nieuwland
authors.affiliation: Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language, Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain; Ikerbasque Foundation, Basque Foundation for Science, Bilbao, Spain.
authors.forename: Manuel
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Carreiras
mesh_terms: D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology*; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D013030:Spain; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Agreement attraction; Anterior negativity; ERPs; Ellipsis; Interference; Memory; NRef; P600; Retrieval cues; Sentence processing