title: Is the noun ending a cue to grammatical gender processing? An ERP study on sentences in Italian.
abstract: Gender-to-ending consistency has been shown to influence grammatical gender retrieval in isolated word presentation. Notwithstanding the wealth of evidence, the exact role and the time course of processing of this distributional information remain unclear. This ERP study investigated if and when the brain detects gender-to-ending consistency in sentences containing Italian determiner-noun pairs. Determiners either agreed or disagreed in gender with the nouns whose endings were reliable or misleading cues to gender (transparent and irregular nouns). Transparent nouns elicited an increased frontal negativity and a late posterior positivity compared to irregular nouns (350-950 ms), suggesting that the system is sensitive to gender-to-ending consistency from relatively early stages of processing. Gender agreement violations evoked a similar LAN-P600 pattern for both types of nouns. The present findings provide evidence for an early detection of reliable gender-related endings during sentence reading.
authors: BCBL, Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, Donostia-San Sebastian, Spain.
authors: Sendy
authors: S
authors: Caffarra
authors: School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand.
authors: Anna
authors: A
authors: Siyanova-Chanturia
authors: Department of Biomedical, Metabolic and Neurological Sciences, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Modena, Italy.
authors: Francesca
authors: F
authors: Pesciarelli
authors: Department of Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, University of Trento, Rovereto, Italy.
authors: Francesco
authors: F
authors: Vespignani
authors: Department of Biomedical, Metabolic and Neurological Sciences, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Modena, Italy.
authors: Cristina
authors: C
authors: Cacciari
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D003463:Cues; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007558:Italy; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011932:Reading; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Agreement; ERPs; Gender-to-ending consistency; Grammatical gender; Language processing